A few months ago, Batul Ebrahami, 18, was a high school student in Tehran. The daughter of a shopkeeper, she was relatively well off but enormously frustrated with the dictates of the Islamic fundamentalists who rule Iran. "Women were not allowed to do anything productive," she complains.
After two arrests by Iran's ubiquitous secret police for openly complaining about the mullahs, Ebrahami fled, but not to Europe or the U.S. Today she resides in a dusty camp in Iraq, a soldier in one of the most unusual and little known military forces in the world. The National Liberation Army (N.L.A.) of...