Women of war: The powerful portraits of Aleppo’s all-female fighting unit which have won a prestigious photography prize

• Sebastiano Tomada's photos won a medal from Prix de la Photographie Paris
• They are of women fighters who organised a unit in Aleppo last march
• Aleppo's rebel forces are now besieged by army units loyal to Syria's regime

Daily Mail | 14 July 2014

In March last year, photographer Sebastiano Tomada ventured to Aleppo, Syria, then a centre of the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad, to photograph the fighters there. 

What he found astonished the world. In the midst of this brutal civil war in the heart of the Muslim Middle East,  an entirely female detachment of fighters who had taken up arms against the regime. 

The photographs he sent back made headlines across the West. And now, nearly a year-and-a-half later, his work has been recognised with a gold medal from the Prix de la Photographie Paris. 

Left is Amal, 30, a married housewife with three children. Right, Benifet Ikhla, 27, a widow with six children

Left, Om Faraj, a housewife aged 30 with no children. Right, Ali, 16 years old, a student

Left, Rana, a 20-year-old student. Right, Khansa, 42, a married housewife with seven children

Left, Om Ahmad, 72, a housewife with three children. Right, Fadwa, a 20-year-old widow with three children

Mr Tomada met the fighters, some of whom were with their children, in a secret command post inside Aleppo. Many of them had been compelled to fight by injustices and humiliations dealt out by the regime and its henchmen. 

One of them, Om Ahmad, a 72-year-old mother-of-three, told him how she had fled wit her to Aleppo after her home in Dara'a was destroyed by bombers. 

'I chose to pick up a weapon and fight the regime,' she said.

For another woman among them, Benifet Ikhla, a 27-year-old widowed by the fighting, her motivation was equality for women. 'I fight for life and freedom, I fight to prove that woman and man are equal,' she said.

A third, Fadwa, a widowed mother-of-three aged just 20, was more nihilistic. She said: 'My husband died on the front lines, I will die on the front lines, may God help us.'

At the time around 150 women had joined the katiba - which means battalion or phalanx in Arabic - and according to a monitoring group they were playing a key role in the fierce fighting around the city.

Sebastiano Tomada met the fighters, some of whom were with children, in a secret command post in Aleppo

At the time around 150 women had joined the katiba - which means battalion or phalanx in Arabic - and according to a monitoring group they were playing a key role in the fierce fighting around the city

In those days of spring 2013, Syrian rebels - many of whom came from rural areas around Aleppo - had seized control of large parts of the city and the regime was on the back foot. 

It looked as if the regime was defeated in the city, despite having broad support among residents. But the lack of unity among the disparate rebel battalions, who ranged from the largely secular Free Syrian Army - with whom the women were aligned - to the outwardly Islamist al-Nusra front, made organised defence difficult.

When the regime, backed by fighters from the Lebanese militant group Hezbullah, launched its counter-attack in late March, splits among the rebel groups became difficult to paper over, while atrocities committed by some eroded their public support. 

Last month the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that as many as 7,000 people have been killed in rebel infighting since January alone, including some 650 civilians caught in the crossfire.

Now as Syrian Army special forces make a fresh push on Aleppo, control of the city is again in the balance, with reports that rebel positions are under siege, their supply lines to Turkey in the north cut off.

There is no fresh news of the FSA's all-female unit, but their memory lives on.