Warrior queen divorces her husband to lead 40-strong women's brigade

A Syrian mother of seven was so determined to help fight against Bashar Al Assad that she divorced her husband to lead a 40-strong women’s brigade.Khowleh, the name she adopted after the uprising began, started the brigade in February 2012 and the women fought on the frontlines with guns. But the 35-year-old has now been forced to abandon the Khowleh bint Al Azwar brigade and lives as a refugee in Irbid, Jordan, 20 kilometres from the Syrian border.When the uprising began Khowleh did not support it and dismissed news of unarmed protesters being shot dead in the streets, reports The National. But her stance changed a month later after when she attended a funeral of a doctor who was shot dead while treating wounded civilians.'I saw the body in a coffin and from that moment I was with the revolution, I started taking part in protests that day,' she said. She was so incensed that she joined demonstrations to help the revolution.But her new found politics did not please her husband, who she had married when she was 15 and lived with in Hirak, Khowleh. When he demanded that she pick him or the cause, she choose her brigade and the couple divorced.Khowleh used her gender to her advantage when helping to free local men as women were targeted less on visits to military bases and checkpoints - she helped free 15 men.Although she was arrested on one venture and held for several days, Khowleh was not deterred.In early 2012 Khowleh began to smuggle weapons through checkpoints - she had lost faith in the power of peaceful protest as the bloodshed had increased.Along with 40 other women she started a brigade -  the Khowleh bint Al Azwar, named after a female Arab warrior from the 7th century.'We were taught how to use rifles at school as part of our military youth training,” she said. 'We knew how to fire a Kalashnikov and had been instructed in how to properly throw hand grenades, so it wasn’t difficult for us.'The women fought alongside all male-brigades, but they disbanded after thousands of people fled and members became fewer.Khowleh left the country late last year because she had no-one to look after her children.They now live in a refugee camp, although she longs to return to the brigade.She says she finds life in the camp harder than fighting on the front lines in Syria. She is keen to return to Syria when the bloodshed ends, but is wary of what the new nation could like like.This morning the leader of one of Syria's most prominent rebel units died of wounds sustained during a strike by government forces last week, his group said, dealing another blow to fighters reeling from a series of recent battlefield losses. The death of Abdul-Qadir Saleh, founder of the Tawhid Brigade, followed advances by President Bashar Assad's troops against rebels on two key fronts: the capture of a string of opposition-held suburbs south of Damascus and the taking of two towns and a military base outside the northern city of Aleppo. An ongoing offensive meanwhile is driving hundreds of refugees into neighboring Lebanon, as government forces seek to dislodge rebels from a mountainous area that stretches north of the Syrian capital. A total of 6,000 have crossed to a Lebanese border town over the last three days, the U.N. says. Meanwhile Syria's ambassador to Russia said insufficient funding and unspecified actions by militants fighting to oust President Bashar al-Assad are hindering the government's compliance with a deal to abandon chemical weapons, the Interfax news agency reported on Monday.'The main obstacles to Syria fulfilling its commitments (are) the lack of provision of the funding necessary to fulfill this task,' Ambassador Riad Haddad was quoted as saying. 'On top of that, armed groups are creating hindrances to satisfying the agreement's conditions.'(dailymail.co.uk)ANN.Az