A New Twist on the Winged Lion?

Lately I've been following the action in Syria and Iraq involving
Kurdish resistance to ISIL. And I stumbled on this. Seems the
eagle and sometimes the falcon is a kind of totem animal for them.

And they are (at least lately) being referred to as lions. And there are
four main loci of operation, which might end up being four separate
Kurdistans or four autonomous regions within a united Kurdistan:
Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran (with some scattered presence elsewhere).
This of course would only be relevant to the chicken winged leopard,
not the eagle winged lion.

It is being argued that they, being devoted to multiethnic peace
and being more focussed on their culture and people than on
any one religion, therefore devoted to secularism (at least those
running the Iraqi and Syrian sections and the PKK element
in Turkey) are the best boots on the ground against ISIS/ISIL,
and should get a lot more help from the USA.

Russia has a history of friendly relations with the Kurds.

The Kurds have a plethora of religions among them, both main
strands of Islam (with a lot of concomitant problems like
arranged marriages and female genital mutilation in Iraq and
probably elsewhere, but a long and complicated history of
some undercurrent of sex equality that occasionally surfaces
in the form of some female tribal leader or woman warriors
here and there, and you can search old photos of them and
maybe once see a veiled woman and only produced a few
jihadis so far), at least three zoroastrian connected small weird
cults and 10% of the population is Christian. Apparently you
are not at that much risk of being killed for converting from
Islam to Christianity among them, one of the earlier Barzanis
who left a legacy of environmental and other issues was a
Christian convert and didn't lose his leadership position.

Both the Rojava (Syria) and KRG (Iraq) groups have just
outlawed polygamy and the latter are looking at prosecuting
those who evade the law already in place by going outside of
Kurdish controlled land. Both have female combat troops,
though the KRG run Peshmerga may be scaling back their
actual use, while in Rojava (location of Kobane) the PYD
govt. there has both male (YPG) and female (YPJ) combat
units in place before the ISIS attack that brought them to world
attention.