Doingtime2: 2014

Kurdish teenage girls fight in Kobani as Turkish forces stand back “The world can see clearly who the true defenders of Kobani are,” said a female mourner. “America destroyed half of Iraq in 24 hours, but ISIS has surrounded us for more than a year-and-a-half and they haven’t done anything.”

Female mourners helped to carry Fatima’s coffin - wrapped in the red-and-white flag of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK - in a funeral procession from the municipal hospital in the Turkish frontier city of Suruc in northern Kurdistan.

She was buried along with an even younger male fighter, Mujaid Ahmed , said to be 16, who also died on Friday, when the fighting in Kobani was particularly fierce. It was on that day that the heavily-armed jihadists reportedly captured 40 per cent of the town, including the police and security headquarters.

Yet at the funeral, it was the contribution of the female fighters that particularly drew attention. It showed the glaring ideological gap between the PKK, a socialist revolutionary party that champions gender equality, and the mindset of their jihadist opponents.