Pictures of Kurdish martyrs that hangs in the municiple building in Afrin, a major Kurdish town in northern Syria

Ruken reads Nietzsche and Aristotle, smokes Gauloises Blondes and last month she shot her first man dead with a Russian-made assault rifle.

Amid an increasingly Islamicised struggle in which bearded men, religious conservatism and Islamic slogans have become the face of Syria’s revolution, the 27-year-old commander of 40 Syrian-Kurd fighters in Aleppo, all of them women, is unusual in every way.

“For me this isn’t just a battle for the people but a battle for women too,” she said last week, hard-eyed and unsmiling, perched on a bench in an abandoned hair salon a block away from the front line in the city’s contested Sheikh Maqsood quarter.

Sporadic mortar rounds crashed into the streets outside and the occasional bullwhip-crack of sniper fire echoed across the