Anastasia Taylor-Lind took this picture of a Kurdish Peshmerga fighter in Iraq in 2003 Enlarge Image

Anastasia Taylor-Lind, 23, of the University of Wales College Newport, spent a month capturing images of the female Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.

Her work beat 8,000 rivals in the Guardian Weekend magazine competition.

Judge and leading photographer David Bailey compared her winning picture to "the classic portrait of Che Guevara".

Ms Taylor-Lind, now a visiting tutor at Newport, flies back to Iraq on Sunday on the first of two more trips.

In 2003, she travelled to the Kurdish autonomous zone in northern Iraq to collect images for her college graduation exhibition.

The female fighters, motivated by hatred for Saddam's regime and a desire to avenge the torture and murder of loved ones, became her chosen topic.

Ms Taylor-Lind hopes to spent the summer back in Iraq

She needed a bodyguard as well as a translator on the trip and slept along the side of roads to avoid land mines.

But the privations paid off in the form of a �5,000 prize and a commission for the Guardian.

Road block

She said: "I didn't ever think that David Bailey would ever be commenting on one of my photographs.

"For me, winning this photography competition with this particular image is very important because the photographs were judged on the amount of passion they captured.

"So it's very important for me that this woman in particular was chosen.

"Firstly, of course, because this is a women who is so passionate about what she believes in that she is prepared to take up arms and die for what she believes in.

"She was standing at the road block and holding the gun as it is. I can speak very little Kurdish, she couldn't speak any English.

"So I just went and stood in front of her and pointed at my camera.