My 3-hour firefight with ISIS, by a once ‘quiet, timid Kimmie’
She astounded her family and friends by leaving university and running off to join an all-woman militia in Syria. Now she’s sending graphic dispatches home
WHEN she was a little girl, Kimberley Taylor was painfully shy. ‘She would hide behind you so no one would notice her,’ her mother recalls. Back then, Kimberley — or ‘Kimmie’ as she is known — lived in Darwen, a quiet market town in the heart of rural Lancashire, with her parents and elder sister Samantha. Their dad was a local teacher.
Kimberley was clever; her favourite subject was maths.
But the thing everyone remembers about her is her quiet, timid nature. Kimberley wouldn’t say boo to a goose.
How could her family — how could anyone who knew her in those days — possibly have imagined what the future held for her?
For Kimberley Taylor, now 27, didn’t follow her father into the classroom after studying maths at university. Nor did she get what you might call a ‘normal’ job like her schoolfriends.
This is immediately obvious to anyone who scrolls down her Facebook page, which is dominated by a photograph of a young woman in full-combat fatigues.
Alongside the picture is what’s known as her battlefield name: Zilan Dilber.
‘Zilan Dilber’ is apparently a member of an all-female Kurdish militia group fighting Islamic State in Syria. Extraordinarily, Kimberly ‘Kimmie’ Taylor and Zilan are one and the same.
Miss Taylor, it emerged this week, is believed to be one of the first British women to travel to the hell-hole to take up arms against ISIS.
Her latest dramatic post from the frontline appeared only yesterday.
‘Wake-up call this morning at 4am when ISIS attacked our base,’ she wrote. ‘We put up an incredible fight for three hours. Just two friends slightly injured. I’m so proud to call these people my comrades. We fight with unconditional resistance.
‘I won’t go into details about the attack because it [sic] super gory.
‘Another base was attacked, four comrades were martyred. At the very front, two comrades were martyred.
‘You gave your lives for peace, democracy, and humanity. Your memory will live on in the revolution.’
Her update ends with the words: Sehid nemirin, which, loosely means ‘martyrs never die’ in Kurdish.
So how did this quiet, bright young woman end up taking herself off to one of the most dangerous places on Earth to fight ISIS?
This is what we know. Miss Taylor joined the Officer Training Corps at Liverpool University and is later understood to have turned down a place at Sandhurst Royal Military Academy.
Until now at least, she had no actual military experience.
She left the UK last March, travelling first to Kurdistan in northern Iraq before crossing into northern Syria to take part in the battle for Raqqa, the de facto capital of Islamic State.
She did not tell her family what she was up to until she arrived. Soon afterwards, Miss Taylor revealed her whereabouts on Facebook — on April Fool’s Day last year, stressing that it was not a ‘prank’. ‘You are absolutely crazy’, was the reaction of one friend. Others hailed her as a ‘truly amazing person’.
Miss Taylor last spoke to her family on Christmas Day to reassure them that she was safe.
The young woman on Facebook is dressed in the uniform of the all female YPJ, pronounced YuhPah-Juh, which roughly translates as Women’s Protection Units. This is the all-female brigade of the YPG, the armed forces of Syria’s Kurds.
She is barely recognisable as the ‘lass from Lancashire’ her family and friends recall.
So who is Kimmie Taylor? Her formative years were spent on a newly-built estate in Darwen, Lancashire, where her parents Phil and Mary bought a semidetached house at the end of a small cul-de-sac.
Kimmie, who clearly overcame the reticence of her early years, developed a reputation, alongside her sister Samantha, for being a tomboy who attracted ‘gangs’ of kids — boys and girls — from the surrounding area.
Their sometimes raucous behaviour did not always go down well with elderly neighbours in a row of bungalows across from their home.
The Taylors are believed to have left the estate in 2002 when their marriage broke down.
Kay Bottomley, 81, who still lives in the bungalow directly opposite their old home, remembers them well. She says: ‘They were a good, hard-working couple, and the kids were lovely. They were a very nice family and I always got on with them.
‘I know some people complained, but children are children. They were never a problem to me.’
Kimberly went on to live with her father Phil, 57, in Prescot, Merseyside, when she was 15. She has not spoken to her mother, Mary Lang, 57, from Chorley, properly for years following a family row. This was ‘over something and nothing’ her mother said this week.
Miss Taylor studied maths at Liverpool University but did not complete the course and spent her early 20s travelling the world and hitch-hiking alone.
Her previous life is vividly captured on social media.
In Ghana, in 2013, she is pictured with a snake and monkey on her arm. In Burkina Faso, West Africa, she is playing with young children. In the Estonian capital, Tallinn, she can be seen busking.
Miss Taylor also studied political science at Stockholm University, eventually returning to Britain early last year.
As we now know, she did not stay long. What motivated her to take such a drastic course of action and risk her life in Syria?
She attempted to answer that question on Facebook in September last year.
‘It all began in Athens, Greece, in November 2013,’ she wrote. ‘My first introduction to people fleeing the Syrian civil war. As they sat with me, sincerity in their eyes, telling me their personal stories of tragedy, fear and loss, the reality of war was brought to life for me . . .’
At around that time, the
‘I’m so proud to call these people my comrades’
U.S.-backed YPJ took her on as a volunteer with their media team, taking photographs and compiling reports.
The unit is greatly feared by the jihadis, who believe it to be a disgrace and a dishonour to be killed by a woman in battle, as they think this prohibits them from entering paradise.
After speaking to her family on Christmas Day last year to reassure them that she was safe and well, she wrote an accompanying message on Facebook.
‘I’ve come from the frontline to say Merry Christmas to all my family and friends,’ she announced. ‘I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year. I miss you and love you all.
‘Life is powerful. Revolutionary women together on frontline. We are unstoppable. Soon I should be [re] joining the Raqqa operation. The capital city where ISIS keeps Yezidi children and forces them into sex slavery . . . together we are women liberating women. This is history in the making . . .’
Shortly afterwards Miss Taylor returned to the battlefront. On January 31, in a disarmingly cheery post, she wrote: ‘Heading to the frontline in Raqqa. Ciao!’
Her decision, she said, was influenced by the experience of a friend, an Arab YPJ fighter whose village was ransacked by ISIS last year. Her friend’s eight-year-old sister was repeatedly run over by a car before being pushed off a building. The friend ran off to join the YPJ, where she met Miss Taylor.
Her dispatches on social media make harrowing reading.
Three days after arriving on the frontline again, she wrote: ‘19km from Raqqa.’ Next to her post was a picture of an unexploded mine.
In a subsequent post, she revealed: ‘Three of our comrades were martyred today who were fighting for the freedom of Raqqa.’ She also uploaded a video of women and children liberated from ISIS, writing: ‘Today, the Syrian Democratic Forces liberated a village from ISIS. This video is of the hundreds of civilians who found safety today, all with very happy faces.’
In an interview with Sky News in Syria yesterday, Miss Taylor said: ‘The operation of Raqqa is a chance to tell our ideology, tell the reality of the revolution to the outside world.
‘I see this as maybe the last step towards Daesh [Islamic State] being finished. And for that reason it’s really important that we create diplomacy for outside. We take this chance now that everybody is listening to tell our ideology, to tell our revolution.’
There are thought to be as many as 15 Britons currently fighting alongside the Kurds, but Kimberley Taylor is believed to be the first woman to join their ranks.
Three Britons have been killed fighting against ISIS since the first foreign volunteers arrived in Iraq and Syria in the autumn of 2014.
As the fighting has become more intense in recent weeks, Miss Taylor has been forced to pick up a gun herself, which is apparent from her most recent post yesterday.
It is almost impossible to imagine what her family must be going through now.
Her father said: ‘I was upset in the first instance upon learning of Kimmie’s intentions . . .and worry about her safety.
‘But to ask her not to follow her beliefs would be like asking her to cut her arm off. She just wants to change the world.
‘But where most of us think and talk about it, she acts. She is truly one in a million and we are very proud of who she is and what she stands for.’
But her sister Samantha struck a more sombre note.
‘I don’t expect her to live,’ she admitted. ‘But if she did come back, she could get hit by a bus so I think it is better if she died doing what she believed in.’
Brave words. But what a terrible agony for any family to live with.
‘We’re women liberating women — it’s historic’