THE SUN LADIES VS THE ISLAMIC STATE

A real-life army of heroic women have been fighting the Islamic State spawned by Barack Obama’s premature withdrawal from Iraq. They’re called the Sun Ladies and their story is so tailor-made for drama it’s hard to believe it’s all true.

The Sun Ladies were Yazidi women who in 2014 saw their husbands slaughtered by the Islamic State in Islam’s usual persecution of religious minorities. After that they were taken as sex slaves by the barbarians of the Islamic State. Many escaped as time wore on and – along with other Yazidi women who then underwent military training – formed a force of roughly 2,000 women, called the Force of the Sun Ladies – a reference to the reverence accorded to the sun in the Yazidi belief system.   

The nightmarish memories that help fuel the fighting women include seeing many other Yazidi women jump off cliffs to their deaths – some holding their babies – to avoid the rape and torture that would follow at the hands of the Islamic State forces.