“Her story is too long and too sad,” says Alfred Yaghobzadeh. An alert, unnerving eye is all that’s visible in his portrait of a Yazidi woman who was captured by Isis last year, taken through Iraq to Syria and raped repeatedly. Photographed in a makeshift house with no door, she peeks between a wall and a hanging blanket, lit by sunset.

Islamic State sees all Yazidis as pagan infidels. In August 2014, Isis attacked Yazidi villages in the Sinjar region of Iraq, driving locals into the mountains. They bulldozed villages, captured thousands of women as sex slaves and slaughtered everyone in their path, transforming the area into a terrorised war zone.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bahar, 27, was captured and raped by Isis in Iraq and Syria

Yaghobzadeh travelled to Sinjar to photograph the aftermath of the devastation over several trips in late 2014 and mid 2015. His recent reportage Yazidi Women: Their Bodies a Battlefield shows how gender roles are shifting in the face of fundamentalism. He took partial portraits of women who were kidnapped, tortured and raped by Isis, subjected to “everything you could imagine for women among savages.” On top of the trauma, most deny they were raped because of the culture of shame around sex (young women often say their friends were, but that they were not). The most difficult part of his work, says Yaghobzadeh, was convincing them to be photographed at all. He uses masking techniques to protect his subjects: “even one picture is better than nothing,” he says.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dijla, 30, heads to guard a lookout over Sinjar

One such picture is of a 15-year-old called Gulan closing her eyes and covering her face with her hand, her pink nail polish a gut-wrenching sign of ordinary youth in unfathomable circumstances. Last year, her family was killed and she spent two months in the hands of Isis. She told Yaghobzadeh the only sense of relief she felt was when she was beaten.



Yaghobzadeh has documented conflicts, wars and human crises around the world. Born in Tehran, he has been taking photographs since the Iranian revolution erupted in 1979 while he was at art school. He started working with the Associated Press in 1980, but was accused of collaborating “with the enemies” for dealing with foreign media, so he left for Paris, where he has been based ever since.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gulan, 15, was beaten and raped in months of captivity by Isis in Iraq

His main focus in Sinjar is on the local military, which is now all but run by women. “There is nobody else like them,” he says. “They are fighting Isis! Even America, I’m sorry, is bullshitting – is going there and throwing three bombs: poof.”

Though this is the first all-female brigade of Yazidi fighters, there are precedents nearby. The YPJ (Kurdish Women’s Protection Unit) and YPG (People’s Protection Unit) are the armed branches of a Kurdish coalition in northern Syria, and has thousands of volunteer fighters both men and women. There is a YPJ/YPG subset in Sinjar, who played a crucial role in rescuing Yazidis trapped by Isis on Mount Sinjar in 2014, along with the PKK (Kurdish militant organisation founded on revolutionary Marxism) and the Peshmerga (Kurdish fighters in Iraq).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yazidi women take part in a military training session in Sinjar

It’s a survivalist and egalitarian coalition: men and women are fighting the same battle here. They’ve lost everything, but they’re determined to be useful to their community. The women are always on standby and in uniform: they sleep in it, and they sleep in their shoes. “And they will be in their uniform until they get what they want – independence,” says Yaghobzadeh. This sense of resilience and retribution becomes even more revolutionary in a military context: “For Isis it’s a haram. If you’re killed by a woman, you don’t go to paradise.”

For Isis it's a haram. If you're killed by a woman, you don't go to paradise

Pictures of their training camp are empowered and confident. One image shows a woman looking at her reflection in an uneven shard of mirror, adjusting her headscarf. Her gaze is firm, determined, clear-eyed. “Their decisions are in their hands, no longer in the hands of their families or their brothers,” says Yaghobzadeh.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Young fighters in training

The YPG provide three months of ideological training to new recruits, so they “know who they are, what they are doing, what it is to be equal. It’s easy to teach them to shoot, but psychologically …” The pictures show an unforgiving training regime: “your face is on the ground, you feel the pain,” says Yaghobzadeh.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A young Yazidi woman who has joined a Kurdish protection brigade

The Yazidi brigade has a defensive position, he explains. “Sinjar is about 20% in the hands of Yazidis and Kurds. The rest belongs to Isis. They can’t capture more because they can’t hold it, and they don’t want any unnecessary casualties among their own fighters.” The frontline with Isis is terrifyingly close. “They shoot at each other like Tom and Jerry,” says Yaghobzadeh, who witnessed gunfire exchange. Their lookout is especially sensitive: watching Isis from the height of Sinjar mountain, the soldiers provide essential surveillance of any activity. It’s a strategic position, secured with a machine-gun they captured from Isis. Throughout the area, different militia mix, and though the circumstances are dire, there are jokes and camaraderie still. The foremost freedom for the women is to smoke cigarettes.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rosa, 21, and Rajbin, 19, take a break. One of the fighters’ most cherished freedoms is to smoke

Even empowered, it’s disturbing to see the sheer youth of the fighters. One image shows a uniformed soldier, barely a teenager, visiting her mother and siblings in a refugee camp. Her father was killed, and her mother encouraged her to fight. She wears her fatigues, a denim hoodie, a pink string bracelet and a gun. Nearby, her little sister sits in a bubblegum pink T-shirt and carries a pink handbag.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yazidi fighter Mrali, 16, visits her mother and siblings living in a refugee camp in the mountains

Though it’s a proactive decision to fight, it’s out of calamitous necessity – aid is hardly forthcoming. “Europe closes their eyes, because they have their own interests, mainly economic,” says Yaghobzadeh. Moreover, media coverage of the crisis has dwindled. The news cycle goes fast, and visibility fades quickly once the height of disaster has quieted. Yaghobzadeh laments, “the story is brought to the limit, publicised, but then nobody talks about it.”



“The most important and sensitive position – facing Isis – is in the hands of women,” he says. “Women are always the victim: in the West, in the East, in the Middle East.” But here, “each one has a reason to fight and survive. They know they’re deciding their own life.”

