Female Kurdish Peshmerga take part in their graduation ceremony at a police academy in Zakho district of the Dohuk Governorate of the Iraqi Kurdistan province, Iraq March 30, 2016.
Ari Jalal / Reuters

Late last year, Captain Khatoon Ali Krdr, 36, the commander of an all-female Kurdish peshmerga unit, visited a family in the village of Kocho in northern Iraqi Kurdistan to see a woman who’d had nearly everything taken away by the Islamic State (ISIS). Like Khatoon, the woman and her surviving family members are Yezidis, an ethno-religious Kurdish minority group. ISIS has long enslaved, tortured, and killed, Yezidi women. Khatoon tried to speak to the woman, but she could not answer. These days, she is mute and can only stare ahead.

The woman’s family members told Khatoon that, while the

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