[Ringo]

I'm curious about your take on this.

Main points from the Daily Mail article below:

Quote:

Danish student branded a terrorist after training as 'Lady Death' sniper to fight jihadis in Syria reveals she has lost everything


Joanna Palani, 23, dropped out of college to join the battle against jihadis in Syria, spending nine-day stretches alone on the frontline with her Russian sniper rifle trained on Isis targets.
Now she has been forced into hiding and is facing jail in her adopted country for defying authorities who banned her from fighting jihadis.
[...]
'I was willing to give up my life and my freedom to stop Isis advancing, so that everyone in Europe can be safe. This was my choice. But I am seen as a terrorist by my own country.'

[...]

Joanna insisted: 'I don't want ISIS to threaten European countries or people in the same way they have done in Kurdistan.'
The politics student was issued with a travel ban in September 2015. But she defied authorities to rejoin comrades in her battle-hardened Kurdish unit fighting ISIS in northern Syria from June to October 2016 because she says she couldn't bear to leave the women she had trained.
Now Joanna, who arrived in Denmark aged three with her family as refugees from Iraq, faces up two years behind bars for breaching the travel ban, intended to stop Danes from joining terror groups in the Middle East.

[...]

'The Danish government is trying to set an example of me in court so they can say publicly that I am just the same as ISIS, but I am not a criminal.

[...]

Joanna was arrested on December 7th last year by Denmark's PET intelligence service under tough new anti-terrorism legislation intended to stop citizens taking part in the devastating conflict in Syria and Iraq.
She was held in prison for three weeks before being released on the orders of a judge before Christmas on December 23.
But while she was in jail she learned of a threat from another angle. Joanna was told that ISIS had now put a $1 million-bounty on her head.

[...]

'But I love my independence and freedom as a woman more than I fear being captured or turned into a sex slave by ISIS or for ISIS. My worries about being captured and killed are not as great as my love of freedom. That is what keeps me going.
'My response is to keep moving, to keep going to class, to keep working. I will keep trying to show them that I am a liberated and independent woman. This is how I will defeat them.'

[...]

'It's not so easy for me to be in Denmark when my friends are in Rojava and girls I had trained, who were younger than me, were in Manbij and I was not. I felt ashamed and guilty that I was not there. 'They were trying to say there were no women in Manbij, but I knew they were there and that they were fighting forward.'
So on 6 June last year - still in possession of her passport despite the travel ban - she calmly flew back to northern Iraq. She walked for seven hours through the night to cross the border into northern Syria, where she was then driven to the front-line to be reunited with the young women she had trained to fight.
'Something happened inside me that made me go [back to Syria],' Joanna explained to MailOnline.
'At that time in my life it was so much easier to be there [in Syria].
'I had trained the female fighters, they got injured and they got killed, the fighters I had trained the year before. But no one knew they had died for freedom.'

[...]

[Denmark] has the highest rate of returning jihadis in Europe, according to the International Centre for Counter Terrorism (ICC), due to their benevolent de-radicalisation programme.
Joanna bitterly resents the level of support offered to returning ISIS fighters by the Danish state, as she believes it makes the country a more attractive destination to those instructed to kill her.

[...]

Although apparently an acclaimed marksman Joanna refuses to discuss how many 'kills' she has achieved – insisting there is no honour in crowing about taking someone else's life. But she admits that as a teenager she idolised the female World War 2 Red Army sniper known as the Lady of Death - who shot over 309 Nazis.
[...]
Joanna's YPG battalion claim she has killed 100 ISIS fanatics in morale-boosting propaganda.

[...]

She says she was offered protection by Denmark's PET intelligence service after ISIS put the $1 million bounty on her head, but says she refused because the agency is trying to lock her up under terror laws, and she does not trust them.
Now she sleeps on friends' sofas, in shops and store-rooms, takes showers at friends' homes, relies on charities for clothes and struggles financially.

[...]

Fit and adventurous, Joanna loved the outdoors as a child and first picked up a rifle aged nine, at a shooting range, while on holiday in Finland.
'I remember pulling the trigger and feeling the power,' she told MailOnline.
[...]
She explained: 'After we came home from Finland, I begged my dad to let me begin shooting. I said; 'Baba, Baba [father, father] I want to be like you and train to be a Peshmerga fighter.'
Joanna continued to spend time with her relatives in Kurdistan, where she would spend her summer holidays from high school in Copenhagen.

[...]

So when still a teenager the winds of the Arab spring began blowing Syria Joanna was ready, she says.
Dropping out of college where she was studying politics, philosophy and biology, she went to Syria to join the uprising.
'I could see the uprising in Syria was much more complicated than elsewhere in the Middle East,' she told MailOnline.
'Millions of people were fighting for democracy I wanted to be part of it. I was 17 or 18 when I first went to see it. The females battalion wasn't created back then - that came later.
After first taking up arms against the Assad regime in Aleppo Joanna began a series of trips to Syria – increasingly turning her fire on ISIS as they mounted their rapid charge across the region.
She says she fought the fanatics at Kobane, liberated Yazidi girls imprisoned as sex slaves and switched units to fight ISIS in Iraq.

Her Instagram(which she has blocked as I was writing the thread) is fucked up.

She has a mix of selfies, IED devices, photos of dead friends and enemies and even a picture of her smiling and giving a peace sign to the camera with a blood stained hand - which she claimed was her friends, just shot by ISIS.

More pics: