Margaret George Shello was an Assyrian female fighter who joined the Kurdish guerrillas in their fight against the Iraqi governments in the 1960s.
She joined the ranks of Peshmerga at the age of 20 in 1960, and quickly asserted herself among her male comrades and was given a leading position in important battles such as the battle of Zawita Valley. Circumstances that lead to her early death are still disputed. Most Assyrian organisation believe that she was assassinated by the Kurdish leadership which feared her influence and ethnicity, while the Kurds maintain that she was murdered by a jealous lover after she rejected his marriage offer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_George_Shello
Margaret George, an Iraqi Assyrian Christian, joined the Kurdish resistance movement in Northern Iraq in 1961 at the age of 20. One of the first female rebels in the history of the Kurdish resistance, she quickly asserted herself as a capable fighter, commanding at the head of an otherwise all-male unit.
Within just a few years she became a legendary hero figure whose military exploits, bravery and leadership in the isolated mountain passes of Northern Iraq echoed throughout all of Kurdistan. Iraqi Kurdish leaders deftly transformed her into a local version of Joan of Arc and handed out portraits of her to the peshmerga rank-and-file who carried her photos into battle in the manner of a talisman.
“Margaret liked people to buy photographs so they knew she was a peshmerga and so that other women would go to the mountains like her,” says Zaher Rashid, George’s portraitist, who photographed her at his studio in the town of Qala Diza, near the border with Iran.
Accounts of Margaret’s life - and death - are sketchy at best. Depending on which version you believe, she is said to have met her end in 1969, after many difficult battles, either at the hands of a jealous lover, or the rebel Kurd leadership, the latter of which viewed her popularity and Assyrian nationalism as a threat to their interests and designs.
To this day, Margaret George remains famous among Assyrians and Kurds and some Kurdish fighters still carry photographs of her.
