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Kurdish officials said on Monday that a German woman fighting with Kurdish militia has been killed battling the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Syria.
Kurdish Peoples Protection Units spokesman Nawaf Khalil, the 19-year-old woman, Ivana Hoffmann, died on Saturday while fighting alongside the armed group near the Syrian village of Tel Tamr.
According to the Associated Press news agency, Hoffman is the third foreign national known to be killed fighting with Kurdish forces against ISIL in Syria.
In a statement released by the MLKP, Hoffmann, a member of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (MLKP) in Turkey, joined the militia group also known as YPG about six months ago. The party statement referred to Hoffmann by her moniker, Avashin Tekoshin, and said she died in pre-dawn clashes with ISIL on March 7.
Hoffmann was born in Germany to South African parents. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said she was the third foreigner fighting alongside Kurdish forces to be killed in Syria’s four-year-old civil war.