Killed in the battle for Kobane

A celebrated Kurdish female fighter who bravely commanded an all-female resistance force against ISIS in the besieged city of Kobane is believed to have been killed by the militant group.

Hebun Sinya, also known as Hebun Dêrik, was a prominent figure within the YPJ - the woman-only offshoot of the Kurdish YPG group that has proved so effective in defending Kobane since the city was first attacked by Islamic State terrorists last September.

Last month the Kurdish troops were able to push the final ISIS militants out of Kobane, but official YPG/YPJ sources have now said that Sinya was among four fighters tragically killed in the process.

Sinya appeared in numerous motivational videos and photographs used by the YPG/YPJ to inspire their fighters to continue defending Kobane from the ISIS terrorists attempting to seize control.

At numerous points in the four month siege it appeared the city was close to falling, with Kurdish troops trapped in the centre and surrounded on all sides by the militants, who raped and massacred their way through the suburbs towards the end of last year.

The arrival of Kurdish peshmerga support squadrons from neighbouring Iraq boosted the fightback, however, and by early January the YPG/YPJ had pinned ISIS back into small pockets of the city.

The fearlessness of the Kurdish fighters in the face of ISIS' uncompromising brutality was such that some militants are said to have defied their commanders' orders to continue the fight in Kobane as it had been little more than death trap for them.

However it was in the final push to completely clear Kobane of terrorists that Sinya, a young male fighter named Ywan Zaghrws, and two as yet unidentified others are understood to have been killed.

YPJ is short for Yekîneyên Parastina Jinê, which means Women's Protection Units in Kurdish. The group was established in 2012 as a branch of the YPG (People's Protection Unit) and is believed to have anything between 7,000 and 10,000 members - mostly in Syria and Iraq.

The majority of these female fighters have spent the past six months battling ISIS and have had great success in pinning the terror group back and liberating towns and cities under the militants' control.

The fact the YPJ is an all-female group has had another unexpected benefit as ISIS militants are said to believe that if they are killed by a woman, they will not be rewarded with 72 virgins in the afterlife.

'These [ISIS] soldiers apparently believed that if they were killed in battle, they went to paradise as long as they were killed by a man,' Ed Royce, who chairs the U.S. House International Relations Committee, told The New York Post last September.

'And these female soldiers were communicating their satisfaction with the fact that they had taken the fight to ISIL and had stopped the advance, turned back the advance - slayed a number of these fighters, who would then run away,' he added.

As a result ISIS militants have been reluctant to enter battles with the YPJ, reportedly leading to descent within the ranks of the terrorists and hastening their retreat from battles in places like Kobane.

(dailymail.co.uk)

ANN.Az