SURUC, Turkey (AP) – It was an easy decision to make. Barely out of school, Perwin Mustafa Dihap wanted to follow in the footsteps of three of her older siblings and go to war. Before long, she was on the front line in the Kurdish Syrian city of Kobani, her hometown on the Turkish border besieged on three sides by extremists from the Islamic State group.
Just two months later, the 19-year-old lay dying in a hospital across the border in Turkey, wounded in an Oct. 6 mortar attack on her position in the city.
The doctor told her family the young woman’s chances were slim, despite her surviving a five-hour operation. Yet Dihap still held out hope.
“We went to the hospital … and I asked her how she was doing, and she said: ‘Don’t worry about me. If I get better, I will go back to fight again,'” said her 34-year-old brother, Kemal Mustafa Dihap.
But she didn’t get better. As her condition deteriorated, doctors transferred her to two other hospitals in larger Turkish towns in an effort to save her. In the last two days, she was too weak to speak. Dihap died in the early hours of Nov. 5.