Bereaved women join fight against Islamic State in northern Afghanistan

LONDON: Gul Bibi, an Afghan grandmother well into her eighties, never expected to become a fighter. But now she is one of more than a hundred women in Afghanistan’s northern Jawzjan province who have taken up arms against Islamist militants.

Nearly all of the women have lost a husband, son or brother to the Taliban or the newly active Islamic State in the province bordering Turkmenistan. “I lost nine members of my family. The Taliban and Daesh (Islamic State) killed my five sons and four nephews,” Bibi said by phone from Jawzjan.

“I have taken up arms to defeat the terrorists so other people’s sons won’t get killed.”

Determined to protect their families, the women approached a local police commander, Sher Ali, in December and asked him for guns and ammunition.

“They came to me and said that if I didn’t provide them with weapons they would kill themselves -- before Daesh or the Taliban could,” Ali told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

The women are not a properly structured group, he said; they have no uniform and have not received any military training other than how to point a gun at the enemy and shoot.

On Dec 25, Islamic State fighters attacked Garmjar village and killed five civilians, burned down about 60 houses and forced 150 families to flee, he said by instant messenger.

A woman in her twenties, who did not want to give her name, said her husband and many other family members had been killed by the Taliban.

Now she is fighting back, she said. “I hit the Taliban with this PK (machine gun), and the Taliban fled. Most of the their men died. I will stand against Daesh and will hit them too,” she said by phone from Jawzjan.

The women fighters are not registered with the army or police and the government has not licensed their weapons, Abdul Hafiz Khashi, head of the security department of Jawzjan police, was reported as saying in the Afghan media last week.

Although local police have cautiously welcomed the new defence force, he said, the rag-tag women’s unit has raised concerns among higher authorities.

“We do not support any armed group, unless they come under one of our forces,” Najib Danish, the deputy spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, said from Kabul.

“We hope they join the Afghan security forces, so we can help them as part of our troops,” he said.

But the women accuse the Afghan army of failing to protect their families from the militants.

“First they killed my brother, then they killed my cousin, my uncle and my brother-in-law,” said Zarmina, another woman fighter. “Now that I have taken up arms, I am going to fight to the death.”

Mariam lost three members of her family in the Islamic State attack on Garmjar village in December. She fled to Qush Tepa and joined the women fighters.

“Daesh came, hit us, abused us, killed our people and burned about a hundred houses. They didn’t leave anything for us. They killed three members of my family. They wanted to burn us, but we fled and came here,” she said by phone. “When you have nothing left in your life, you will take up weapons and fight to the death.”