Before the Syrian revolution, Layla, who requested that her real name remain confidential, was a university student in a rebel-held district of Aleppo. But in January 2013, after witnessing a bombing at her campus that killed 82 people, including some of her classmates, she now carries a Kalashnikov rifle and supports the Free Syrian Army (FSA) at a checkpoint positioned at the northeast end of the city.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based, pro-opposition monitoring group, some 5,000 women in Syria are currently engaged in military combat and logistics. AFP reported that one in five fighters is female in the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), the armed wing of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party. In Arabic, they are called muqatilat, meaning women fighters, and they have formed female battalions throughout the country. Muqatilat are small in number in comparison to the male mujahedeen fighters, and even though they carry weapons, they don’t call the shots in the rebel command. Nevertheless, they can be found alongside male fighters on the frontlines — often in defiance of traditional gender roles.

Syrian activists on the ground provide different explanations for why female battalions emerged. Some say that the first battalions were formed in May 2012, shortly after forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad massacred 108 civilians — including 34 women and 49 children — in the city of Homs. Other female brigades formed out of necessity soon after that. The Daughters of al-Walid, for instance, announced on YouTube that it arms and trains women to defend themselves. And self-defense is much needed: According to the International Rescue Committee, violence against women, especially rape, is the main motivation for flight among Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon — more than shelling and air raids.

Other activists say that female battalions are more a front in the psychological war than the physical battlefield. Some of these battalions may be a sectarian response to the regime recruiting its own muqatilat. Assad has recruited up to 500 women for a paramilitary force called the Lionesses for National Defense, a subsidiary of the National Defense Force (NDF), the regime’s key counterinsurgency arm. A Syrian journalist and activist living in Lebanon told me that the symbolism of NDF women reflects Syria’s growing sectarian divide. Recruited from Assad’s Alawite sect, they try to transmit a liberal and empowered image by dressing in camouflage and operating checkpoints.