MARTIN HIMEL:

Walk along the streets of Kurdistan's second largest city, Sulaymaniyah, and you'll instantly notice that it looks nothing like most of the images we see coming out of Iraq.

By all appearances, this oil rich city in northeastern Iraq is thriving. Shoppers fill the streets without apparent fear of terror bombs, roads into and out of this city of over 800,000 are safe and well maintained.

But what is most striking in this overwhelmingly Muslim region, is that women enjoy much more freedom than in many other areas throughout the Middle East, even as you'll see later, serving in all-women fighting units taking on ISIS.