A young German woman fighting alongside Kurdish forces battling the Islamic State group has been killed in Syria, Kurdish officials said Monday. Hoffman is the first female foreign fighter known to have been killed on the Syrian front lines.

Ivana Hoffman, 19, died on Saturday while fighting with the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) near the Syrian village of Tel Tamr, YPG spokesman Nawaf Khalil said.

Hoffman, a member of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party in Turkey, joined YPG fighters about six months ago, Khalil said.

Serdar Sitr, president of Iraq’s Kurdish Solution Party, and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also confirmed Hoffman’s death, the exact circumstances of which remained unclear.

Hoffman, who was born in Germany to South African parents, is the third foreign national – and the first female foreign fighter – known to have been killed fighting with Kurdish forces.

Some 4,000 women are fighting in the armed wing of the Syrian opposition Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), say Kurdish officials, who refuse to disclose the total number of their fighters for strategic reasons.

Female fighters made up a significant portion of the Kurdish troops fighting Islamic State militants in Kobane, which the Kurds successfully wrested from jihadist control in January.

Nassrin Abdallah, 36, is a Syrian Kurd who was on the front lines with the forces that liberated the key city on the Syrian-Turkish border.

"In Kobane, women were fighting on all fronts, in all the trenches against a brutal enemy," she told cheering crowds during a visit to Paris in February.

As the head of the armed wing of the Kurdish PYD, Abdallah has led both men and women into battle.

According to Abdallah, around 40 percent of the Kurdish fighters battling in Kobane were women.

That is seen as a particular triumph against the Islamists, for women in areas under the Islamic State group’s control are repressed, obliged to wear the veil and forced into sexual slavery, as was the case with the Yazidi Christian minority in Iraq.

"Daesh is a major danger for women and their status," said Assia Abdallah, co-president of the PYD, using the Arabic name for the Islamic State group.

'Scared of fighting women'

The PYD has close links with the outlawed rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has fought a three-decade-long insurgency in southeast Turkey and is blacklisted as a terrorist organisation by Ankara and some of its Western allies, including the United States.

But in a sign of growing international recognition, Assia Abdallah and Nassrin Abdallah held talks in mid-February at the Elysée Palace with French President François Hollande – the first such meeting of its kind.

Like the PKK, the PYD has a policy of placing equal numbers of men and women at the head of its political and military structures.

In the Kurdish zones of Syria, the PYD has decreed that women have the same rights as men and have forbidden girls from marrying before the age of 18.

They have also outlawed "honour crimes", violence and discrimination against women as well as polygamy, which is permitted in Islam.

The Kurdish fighter Abdallah, a former journalist from northeastern Syria, says she is unmarried but otherwise provided very few details about her private life.

The hardest thing about being on the front lines is the lack of weapons and ammunition, she said.

And for all their emphasis on martyrdom in the name of jihad, Abdallah said Islamic State militants are afraid of doing battle against female fighters.

"They are scared of fighting against women. They believe they will not go to Paradise if they are killed by a woman.”

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and AP)