A 23-year-old European Kurdish woman who dropped out of college in Copenhagen, Denmark to fight against the Islamic State (ISIS) says the jihadist militants are "very good at sacrificing their own lives," hence are "very easy to kill."
Interviewed in the website Broadly, Joanna Palani says she left college in November 2014 to fight, first for the People's Protection Unit in Syria, known as the YPG, and then for the Peshmerga, the Western-trained and backed army of the Kurdish Regional Government.
"ISIS fighters are very easy to kill," Palani says. However, fighters loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are much tougher. "ISIS fighters are very good at sacrificing their own lives, but Assad's soldiers are very well trained and they are specialist killing machines," she says.
She says her most recent role in the war against ISIS was to train young Kurdish fighters.
"The young girls are amazing — they are exhilarated after coming back from the front lines," she tells Broadly. "They are very brave, more brave than I could ever have been at their age."
Born in a U.N. refugee camp in Ramadi, Iraq, in 1993 during the Gulf War, Palani, together with her family, fled and settled in Copenhagen when she was a toddler.
The daughter and grand-daughter of Peshmerga fighters, the Iranian Kurdish girl says she lived a "normal, comfortable life" with her family in Copenhagen.
However in the fall of 2014, she left college and her comfortable life and headed to fight in Syria for the Kurds. Palani says she wanted to help defeat ISIS and Assad and "fight for human rights for all people."
She recalls her first night on the front line. While on night patrol with a foreign fighter from Sweden, they were attacked by a sniper who had seen the smoke from a cigarette and shot her comrade between the eyes.
In Syria she gained a reputation for firing at the right time and keeping quiet at the right time—two skills essential to being a good soldier, she says.
Her military career in the Kurdish army appeared to be on the rise when she decided to take a 15-day leave to see her family in Copenhagen last year.
However, the Danish government confiscated her passport under laws intended to stop the movement of Danish people to war-torn areas in the Middle East either to support or fight the ISIS.
Palani subsequently returned to her studies in Denmark.
She says she's disappointed she can't go back to the front line to join her Kurdish comrades in the fight against ISIS.
"I am a European Kurdish girl," she tells the website. "Most of my beliefs and morals are European. I couldn't live in Kurdistan for more than one or two years—it is not very comfortable there as a woman for me. I would rather choose public justice than personal happiness. I would give my life for Europe, for democracy, for freedom and for women's rights. I feel like I have been betrayed by those who I was ready to sacrifice my life for."
