tank girls:

frontline feminists

As the coalition bombs hit the flat salt plains on the north-eastern border of Iraq, members of a little known, female-led Iranian army huddled in a bunker. While the earth shook, showering dust on their neatly pressed khaki headscarves, 25-year old Laleh Tarighi and her fellow combatants tried to protect themselves.

Eighteen months later, recalling the terror of being attacked by British and US bombers during the invasion of Iraq last year, Tarighi, a former pupil of Parkside and Hill Road School in Cambridge, says: "We were puzzled more than afraid. We knew our officers had sent messages to the Pentagon insisting that we were neutral and shouldn't be attacked. We were only in Iraq to overthrow the Islamic fundamentalist regime across the border in Iran."

It is hard to imagine that Tarighi was once a typical British teenager who loved going to the cinema and socialising in cafés. Few of her friends knew that when she was a child in Iran, her father had been executed for being a member of the Iranian resistance, and that her mother was a high-ranking commander in the National Liberation Army of Iran (NLA). After A-levels, Tarighi had planned to study media at university, but then, aged 18, she decided to leave the comfort of the home she shared with her aunt to join her mother in the NLA in a military camp on the Iran-Iraq border.

The NLA is the military wing of the National Council of the Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a female-dominated, Iranian parliament-in-exile whose aim is to topple the Islamic fundamentalist regime and replace it with a secular, democratic government. The NCRI is led by a charismatic Iranian, Maryam Rajavi, 53. Security around her is tight for fear of assassination attempts, and she very rarely appears in public. Her organisation has kept a low profile until it recently started sharing intelligence reports on Iran's nuclear programme with America and Europe.

But, in spite of this co-operation, the NLA is still considered a terrorist organisation by the West. The coalition forces in Iraq have restricted its 3,800 combatants to their camps, and their weapons have been confiscated. Women make up 30 per cent of the NLA, but 70 per cent of the officers are female. The British Army has just one female brigadier, while in the Navy there are four female captains.

Rajavi has long encouraged female participation in the army. She argues that, as misogyny is the mainstay of the Iranian government, who better to strike at it than women? Her female recruits, many of whom had been tortured and imprisoned in Iran, train alongside men in all aspects of frontline battle, including hand-to-hand combat and armoured vehicle operation. With the backing of wealthy Iranian exiles, they are preparing for the day when the order comes to march east over the frontier to liberate their land from the mullahs.