This is a woman who commands respect, I thought. She keeps a Beretta 9-millimeter pistol in a holster under her left arm. The area around the trigger was silver where the paint had worn off.
The woman in question, 39-year-old Wahida Mohamed -- better known as Um Hanadi -- leads a force of around 70 men in the area of Shirqat, a town 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Mosul, Iraq.
She and her men, part of a tribal militia, recently helped government forces drive ISIS out of the town.
In the man's world that is rural Iraq, female fighters are a rarity.
'More wanted than the Prime Minister'
Um Hanadi is not new to this.
"I began fighting the terrorists in 2004, working with Iraqi security forces and the coalition," she says. As a result, she attracted the wrath of what eventually became al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which later morphed into ISIS.
"I received threats from the top leadership of ISIS, including from Abu Bakr (al-Baghdadi) himself," she says, referring to ISIS's self-declared caliph.
"But I refused."
"I'm at the top of their most wanted list," she brags, "even more than the Prime Minister."
Um Hanadi ticks off the times they planted car bombs outside her home. "2006, 2009, 2010, three car bombs in 2013 and in 2014."
Along the way, her first husband was killed in action. She remarried, but ISIS killed her second husband earlier this year. ISIS also killed her father and three brothers. They also killed, she added, her sheep, her dogs and her birds.
She narrowly escaped death as well.
"Six times they tried to assassinate me," she says. "I have shrapnel in my head and legs, and my ribs were broken."
She pulled back her headscarf to show her scars.
"But all that didn't stop me from fighting," she said.
Um Hanadi claims to have led her men in multiple battles against ISIS. General Jamaa Anad, the commander of ground forces in her native Salahuddin province, told me they had provided her group with vehicles and weapons.
General Anad, a short, compact, no-nonsense man of few words, simply says: "She lost her brothers and husbands as martyrs."
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