An Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga takes part in a graduation ceremony at the Zakho military academy in the Iraqi Kurdish town of Zakho, some 500 kilometres north of Baghdad, on January 30, 2018. (Photo by Safin Hamed/AFP Photo)

An Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga female officer bites a snake while demonstrating skills during a graduation ceremony in the Kurdish town of Soran, about 100 kilometres northeast of the capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region Arbil, on February 12, 2020. (Photo by Safin Hamed/AFP Photo)

An Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga female officer bites a Rabbit while demonstrating skills during a graduation ceremony in the Kurdish town of Soran, about 100 kilometres northeast of the capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region Arbil, on February 12, 2020. (Photo by Safin Hamed/AFP Photo)

Iraqi Kurdish women train weight lifting at a centre in Iraq's Kurdish regional capital of Arbil on February 2, 2022. Women's sports have developed at a sluggish pace across much of conservative Iraq, which has struggled through decades of conflict. But the Kurdistan region was spared the brunt of the violence and destruction, and its infrastructure, facilities and government funding have paved the way for a boom in professional women's sports. (Photo by AFP Photo/Stringer)

Police detain Sebahat Tuncel, co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Regions Party (DBP), during a protest against the arrest of Kurdish lawmakers, in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, Turkey, November 4, 2016. (Photo by Sertac Kayar/Reuters)

A Kurdish girl wears her relative's assault rifle and ammunition belt as she waits at the Iraqi Kurdish Shaqouli checkpoint, some 35 kilometres east of Mosul, on November 10, 2016. Since the start of the Mosul offensive the Kurds have moved their border some 10 kms closer to Iraq's second city, marking it out with a line in the sand. (Photo by Odd Andersen/AFP Photo)

Kurdish pesh merga troops fire at Islamic State positions as they move toward the Iraqi town of Badana Pichwk on Monday morning, October 17, 2016. Kurdish forces began Monday advancing on a string of villages east of Mosul, the start of a long-awaited campaign to reclaim Iraq's second-largest city from the Islamic State, which seized it more than two years ago, officials said. (Photo by Bryan Denton/The New York Times)

Amal Amro, the Palestinian-Syrian owner, and an employee give a cat medicine at 'Amal Pets Hotel' in Arbil, the capital of Iraq's northern Kurdish autonomous region, on August 24, 2022. (Photo by Safin Hamed/AFP Photo)