Ghazal Molan was nineteen, newly married, and the youngest woman ever to take up arms with the Komala Peshmerga against the Islamic Republic. 

A native of Mahabad, she had fled Iran at eighteen after coming under IRGC surveillance for her role in the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising, slipping across the border to join the Kurdish armed opposition in northern Iraq. 

She did not last a year. This week, an IRGC suicide drone struck the Komala camp in Surdash, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, tearing through a residential compound that housed fighters and their families.