Meet Student Sniper Joanna Palani the badass sniper who killed 100 ISIS Militants.
The 23-year-old Danish Student Sniper Joanna Palani says she has a bounty of $1,000,000 ($1 million) on her head.
She claims she have killed over 100 ISIS militants while fighting alongside the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq and Syria.
Palani is a sniper of Iranian-Kurdish ancestry. She was born in a refugee camp in Ramadi, Iraq during the first Gulf war. She dropped from college in Copenhagen to fight ISIS and Assad’s army.
At a very early age of nine she fired her first gun and followed the footsteps of her father and grandfather’s footsteps to train and become a Peshmerga fighter.
‘It is my life. It is very normal for Kurds to learn to use weapons like this.’, as told to Vice. “As a sniper I could be on the front line for nine days at a time. You have to be very patient. You have to focus. You cannot lose concentration for one moment”
Her first fight was against the Assad regime and then against the ISIS. She bravely fought them in a syrian town of Kobane on the border of Turkey. She fought along with the Kurdish People’s Protection Unit (YPG). While fighting alongside Peshmerga forces in Iraq, she also helped to free Yazidi girls who were imprisoned as sex slaves.
“When we were preparing to liberate houses of ISIS sex slaves, we had this saying – one fighter goes to rescue but many fighters will come back out”
When she returned to her family in Copenhagen for holidays, Danish authorities contacted her and banned her from futher travelling to the worn torn country. Her passport was confiscated under laws intended to stop the movement of ISIS and not those fighting them. Palani was warned she could face six years in jail if she went back to rejoin her battalion.
“Those I risked my life for, are now taking away my freedom. I did not expect to lose almost everything for fighting for our freedom and our safety.”, she said.
Palani flouted her ban and flew back to Iraq, where she walked for seven hours through the night to cross the border into Syria to join her comrades again. Later when she returned, she was locked up in Vestre Fængsel, Demark’s largest prison. After spending 3 weeks behind bars she was finally released, but her her passport has been confiscated.
From then she is living in hiding and changing her location constantly from fear of reprisal.
She believes she’s seen as a terrorist in her own country, and adds, “I am sorry for breaking the law but I had no choice in my mind at the time,”.
