PHOTONEWS: Meet The Women Being Trained To Defend Baghdad

This is day one of a five-day course being offered by the Badr Brigade, a powerful Shiite militia with an estimated 10,000 members, to the wives, mothers, sisters and daughters of the group. The women are not training to go to the front line to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and its allied Sunni militants, but
rather to defend her home if the terror group makes its way into Baghdad and ignites sectarian fighting in the streets.

With most of the men in her family leaving home to volunteer to fight ISIS and its allies, The women says they have no choice now but to learn how to fight.

More than 450 women have been through the training since the group started it this year, a step that was taken after ISIS began its battle for the flashpoint city of Falluja in Anbar province -- a battle that was a bellwether of things to come in Iraq.

And thousands more are waiting, says Maj. Kareem Abdullah of the Badr Brigade, sitting in his office in a fortified compound in Yarmouk, a mixed Shiite-Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad.
The number of women volunteers swelled in June after ISIS seized Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, and then began a march on the Iraqi capital, vowing to hit the city of more than 7 million people and overthrow the Shiite-dominated government.

"We are training these ladies to make them ready if (ISIS) makes it into their neighborhood," Abdullah said. "They will be the ones who have to defend their home."