
This little girl looks about six or seven years old. She chats away with an off-camera adult, who asks her how many Islamic State fighters she has killed. “Four hundred!” she says, speaking in a Kurdish dialect local to Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq. Then the little girl leans over a machine gun bigger than she is, and using both hands, she fires away into the distance. As the shots echo across the desert, the man behind the camera eggs her on: “Kill! Kill!”
The footage this picture is taken from appears to have first surfaced in mid-January on a Facebook page devoted to pro-Kurdish videos, and shortly thereafter it cropped up on a YouTube channel called “Kurdish YPG”. The YPG, or People’s Protection Units, are the armed wing of the...