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Stanley Greene © Noorimages April 2013 ..Aleppo city's embattled district of Sheikh Maqsud,Snipers rule the roofs and the streets . ..Sitting the smallest in a group of fighters waiting for orders of the day is 18-year-old Mumtaz who says joining the rebellion more than a year ago was a "liberating experience"..The only fighter in her family of four, she says she morphed overnight from an unknown high school girl to a warrior after she joined a YPG training camp in her hometown of Afrin, a largely Kurdish town north of Aleppo.."Picking up the gun was a personal choice," said the sinewy bandana-clad fighter, a choice that bestowed freedom from rigid social mores that deem marriage the only culturally appropriate rite of passage for women..s she spoke, her comrades, both men and women, took a break from duty in a nearby room of a deserted and desolate former beauty parlor smoking, chatting and eating , Women live separately from male fighters and relationships are strictly forbidden. ..The Committees for the Protection of the Kurdish People (YPG) brigade is 20 percent women -- are the hidden face of Syria's armed rebellion against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, now in its third year..The YPG, which recently joined forces with Syrian opposition rebels, is the armed wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), widely considered the Syrian offshoot of Turkey's outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK)..Unlike their Arab counterparts, Kurdish women have a long tradition of combat roles. The PKK's fierce women fighters grabbed worldwide attention in the mid-1990s with their frightening zeal in launching suicide bombings..But women combatants, no matter what their ethnicity, still stand out as a striking anomaly in Syria's male-dominated rebellion..Some media reports indicate that women are part of both pro- and anti-regime armed forces, but their presence is far less visible on the front lines compared to Kurdish fighters..Engizek, who goes by a single name, says the YPG's (KEYSTONE/NOOR/)