Helly Luv can barely sit still, she’s so excited. Filming has just wrapped on her new music video, “Revolution”—which will be, if all goes well, her second hit in Iraqi Kurdistan. “It’s going to be huge,” she says, sitting on a sofa in the lobby of the Erbil Rotana, the city’s first international five-star hotel, built just across the street from a park named after a Kurdish politician killed by Al Qaeda. Her dark eyes are so wide and round and her lashes so thick with mascara that every blink looks like the blooming of a tropical flower. The people in the lobby appear transfixed.

In the video, a group of Kurdish fighters, called peshmerga, liberates a village occupied by militants with the Islamic State. Helly insisted on filming near the front lines between Erbil and Mosul, a few kilometers, she says, from where real ISIS soldiers were occupying real villages. The actors in the video are real Syrians living as refugees near Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. Some peshmerga are real, as are the weapons and the tanks. The fires are real, if stage managed. The only thing out of place is Helly. Her dyed crimson hair flowing out from under her military helmet, Helly rescues a baby, storms the front lines, and leads security cadets in Janet Jackson–like march choreography. In one scene, she stands in the path of an approaching ISIS tank holding a banner that reads, in English, “Stop the Violence.” In another, she dances on the hood of a car in a junkyard, the word revolution emblazoned on her fatigues. “I’m very, very sure this song is going to just … blow up,” Helly says. “Because this is hot right now.”

“This” is the war with ISIS, which, by the time Helly and I meet in April of 2015, has ravaged large parts of Iraq and Syria, and encroaching forces continue to threaten Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish north, where approximately six million people, mostly Kurds, live alongside an estimated 1.8 million refugees and internally displaced persons. Each day brings a new battle and new worries, and Kurds, along with the rest of the world’s population, are tracking ISIS’s progress with a fearful avidity. In pop parlance, they’re obsessed.

Helly opens her MacBook to show me raw footage of the “Revolution” video, but the computer is dead. “Rekar, where’s the cord?” she calls out to her body guard, a short and pleasant Kurd whose job is to maintain a deep perimeter between Helly and whomever she doesn’t want to talk to. Rumor has it that Rekar is actually a member of the Kurdish security forces known as asayish, who are aligned with the ruling Kurdish party, the KDP. You don’t want to mess with him, I’m told.

The conspiracy theories add to Helly’s celebrity mystique, more acutely so because they have the ring of truth: she’s a singer with only one hit to her name, 2013’s “Risk It All,” who lives in a $300-a-night hotel, and “Revolution” was produced in part by local businesses with supposed government ties. She headlined Erbil’s Newroz festival—the region’s most important music show, taking place on Kurdish New Year—in place of more recognizable artists. But Iraqi Kurdistan—a would-be oil state with a leadership dominated by family names, where stalwart optimism about becoming an independent nation clashes with economic and political realities, including, now, ISIS—often seems to function like one big conspiracy.

Rekar retrieves the tangled cord from a large shoulder bag and kneels to plug it into a socket near Helly’s feet. “Thank you,” Helly says when the computer chimes on, smiling sweetly. Rekar melts back toward a nearby couch, more of a hopeful high schooler stuck in the friend zone than a trained killer.

Sipping hot milk with honey, Helly illustrates how close the “Revolution” film crew had been to ISIS by arranging pink heart-shaped sunglasses, an iPhone in a sparkly case, and a metallic clutch on the couch. “Kalak”—an embattled town between Mosul and Erbil—“is here,” she says, pointing to the glasses. “Here is a peshmerga tank”—the phone—“and here we are.” She pokes the clutch and laughs. “There’s no way a Hollywood production would ever do something like this. It’s so risky.”

One day on set, when nearby gunfire pushed the cast and crew to run for cover, Helly decided to record a video selfie on her phone. In the video, she speaks to the camera, a mostly empty dirt road behind her and the crack of gunfire seeming to come from just over her head. Then, suddenly, the gunshots grow louder. Helly drops the phone and the picture goes dark. The footage became an epilogue to the “Revolution” video, but it served a purpose beyond being a tasty behind-the-scenes moment for fans. For Helly, who was born in Iranian Kurdistan but raised in Finland, the footage was proof: that she had truly risked her life to shoot the video, that she understands the suffering Kurds face, that she supports the troops.

True, Helly didn’t live through the decades of horror under Saddam Hussein and doesn’t understand the intricacies of Kurdish politics, at least not well enough to discuss them in public. Her spoken Kurdish is improving, but it was broken when she arrived after years of living in the United States, and she speaks English with an American accent. In the span of a year, she had transformed from giggling pink-clad LA pop singer in the vein of the Pussycat Dolls to a militant anti-extremist and the star of two moody, serious films about the Kurdish condition. But she was still struggling to prove herself, which is where the extra footage came in handy. In 2015, nothing proved Kurdishness more than being fired on by ISIS.

Like a lot of aspiring pop stars, present-day Helly Luv evolved as a concept—one limb of Helan Abdullah, born in Iran in 1988, at the height of the persecution of Kurds across the border in Iraq. Her mother and grandfather were both peshmerga, and Helly’s style is meant to appeal to both Los Angeles clubgoers and Kurdish patriots. She’s at once provocative and buttoned-up, as if a young Madonna had convinced a Middle Eastern news anchor to let loose for a night. She wears tight blazers with stilettos and long-sleeved white dresses with the backs cut out, and covers her fingers with gold and jewels that may or may not be real. Her thick black eyeliner flares at the corners, and her cheeks bear precisely applied stripes of pink blush. On Instagram, where she posts photos of herself multiple times a day for her half-million-plus followers, her skin can appear to be laminated.

By the late 1980s, Iraqis had been living under Saddam Hussein for nearly a decade. The Kurds, who had a long history of rebelling against the central Iraqi government, were suffering the worst of the dictator’s brutality. The year Helly was born marked the height of the Al-Anfal campaign, during which Saddam Hussein’s air force dropped chemical weapons over towns in Halabja, an eastern city in Iraqi Kurdistan (today a province), killing thousands.

Halabja was not the first attempt by Saddam to eliminate the Kurdish threat, but it was the worst, and for Iraqi Kurds today it represents the necessity of independence. They fled the country by the hundreds of thousands, joining others from Turkey, Iran, and Syria in a mass migration to Europe, the United States, and Canada. Helly’s parents had wanted to fight, but life as peshmerga was hard, and now they had an infant. In the early 1990s, during the first Gulf War, they traveled through Turkey as refugees bound for Finland.

Growing up in Lahti, the industrial Finnish second city, Helly’s parents—now a restaurant owner and a hair stylist—told her stories about Kurdish rebels launching attacks on Iraqi troops from the border mountains. Like many diaspora Kurds of her generation, she sees mostly glory in the stories of hardship. Helly’s parents tried to remind their daughter of her Kurdish heritage, speaking the language, eating the food, and listening to the music of the Kurdish region. But they also exposed her to Western music; Helly’s mother had a particular fondness for Michael Jackson. “In Iran, all you could listen to was Iranian music,” Helly tells me. “So my mom would smuggle cassettes in her bra to her friends. They wouldn’t play it loud, so the neighbors wouldn’t hear, but they would enjoy it. They would dance.” Helly, too, liked to sing and dance from a young age, and quickly realized that she was good at it.

She’s full-on decided to be a pop star, that’s her thing. I think Kurdistan is a stepping-stone. But I don’t blame her. Her project is Helly.

Gradually, Kurds in Iraq began to recover from Al-Anfal. In 1991, American, British, and French coalition forces established a no-fly zone over the Kurdish north. Kurds celebrated the 2003 invasion of Iraq, seeing it as a liberation from Saddam, and the 2005 Iraqi constitution offered them significantly more autonomy and rights. Kurds sent politicians to Baghdad, strengthened their own parliament, and started to develop their oil economy. By the mid-2000s, it seemed to many that Kurdistan was on the brink of independence, and those who had fled began returning to northern Iraq. Some wanted to help, others wanted to go home, and many saw opportunity, but Helly wasn’t yet convinced. She went west, to Los Angeles.

Helly shudders when she talks about LA. Some details she’s eager to make public. She had no money and lived on saltines—“1-dollar crackers,” according to her website. Her apartment was full of roaches and her landlord blackmailed her. Producers who did take an interest in her pushed her performance style in an uncomfortably suggestive direction. “Helly Luv would soon see the ugly side of the music business and [was] often told her talent was not what people would look for,” reads her online bio.

Other aspects of her time in America Helly keeps hidden. A video from that era has been successfully scrubbed from the internet. (The song title is said to include the phrase bad kitty.) Helly, when we meet, refuses to talk about it. “I really suffered,” she says. “I had to leave that situation. I had to leave that music, that sound and just stop and look. Who am I? Who is Helly?” Jacob Russell, a journalist who, with filmmaker Cyrus Moussavi, profiled Helly in 2014, describes the video as on the risqué end of American pop fare.

Helly went to Kurdistan in early 2013 to begin filming a movie, Mardan, in which she plays a Kurdish villager whose husband goes missing. The director, Batin Ghobadi, reached out to her when his lead backed out; like his more famous brother, Bahman, he wanted to make movies that explored and promoted Kurdish identity.

Three years ago, ISIS was Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the parts of Anbar province it occupied seemed comfortingly far away. Erbil was a boomtown, a landscape of construction sites paid for on the promise of billions of barrels of untapped oil, unrecognizable compared to Saddam-era Iraqi Kurdistan. Kurds felt certain that independence was near.

Embracing Western fashion and music was an easy way for Kurds to prove that they were progressive, secular, and ready to be seen as a separate entity from the rest of Iraq. Helly Luv was part of this future Iraqi Kurdistan, what Moussavi refers to as the “version 2.0” of other Kurdish pop stars, who are traditionally entwined with the complex politics and history of the region. Helly is simpler and, for the landlocked region, she provides a bridge outside of the Middle East. Even when her work references current phenomena, like ISIS, it does so in a flatly patriotic way, the way a country singer might rework “America the Beautiful” to include references to 9/11. And, like that country singer, Helly gets something out of the deal. “She’s full-on decided to be a pop star, that’s her thing,” Moussavi says. “I think Kurdistan is a stepping-stone. But I don’t blame her. Her project is Helly.”

This new vision for Iraqi Kurdish culture has proven to be a balancing act. Older Kurds, even those who embrace the region’s newfound wealth and autonomy, are more conservative, and they don’t want to lose their cultural heritage to the globalized megaculture that Helly’s pop sensibility represents; war, poverty, and Saddam-era ethnic cleansing have already wiped out so much of Kurdish history. But even older Kurds may be able to see what Helly could bring to the region. Kurdistan has long struggled to prove that it has an identity apart from “the other Iraq,” the somewhat disparaging name used by the rest of the region. That identity, they insist, is modern, secular, and open-minded. It is the kind of place that could produce its own international pop star. A Shakira could get famous in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Her first time back in Erbil, Helly was struck by the same logic. “When I came and looked around and saw all these buildings and modern hotels and malls, and saw how much this place had changed, I realized, hold on,” she tells me. “You know what I said? I said, ‘It’s time. It’s time for me.’”

“Risk It All” was Helly’s audition for the role of Kurdish Shakira. It was a sensational, if rocky, start. The song mostly evokes an LA club, with Middle Eastern tabla drums added for a measure of authenticity. The video is racy by any standard—Helly wears a gold minidress, casts off a black shroud that evokes a hijab, commands her listeners to “put your guns up in the air” while throwing a Molotov cocktail, and drapes herself over an actual lion—but for a conservative Iraqi Kurdish audience, it was new territory. When Helly shimmies on a rooftop above the Erbil Citadel, the ancient center of Erbil that is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, “it’s about letting go of the past,” she explains. “Because Kurds, we only have darkness in our past. Our history is just death and darkness, blood and wars.”

The video was funded mostly by small donations from like-minded Middle Easterners, with one larger investment from an Erbil construction company whose seal appears in the end credits, and it’s slickly produced. It quickly became a sensation, making Helly, if not yet Kurdistan’s most popular singer, then at least the focal point of a conversation about Kurdish values. Prior to Helly, Kurdish pop stars skewed more traditional, their music dominated by Middle Eastern instruments and styles of singing, no matter how flashy the video production. People were drawn in by Helly’s vision of Kurdish pop, distinct from the Arab music that dominated in the region.

Some saw her as an impostor, or worse. They called her immodest, which was predictable, and accused her of working for Israeli intelligence or the CIA, which was less so. Some claimed that Barack Obama was behind Helly’s popularity, and that her logo, a cat’s head peering through the middle of an upside-down triangle, had occult significance. “A lot of people accused me of being a Mason, but that’s not true!” she insisted in an interview with a Kurdish newspaper.

Reactions from the press were mixed. Some reporters subscribed to the conspiracy rumors, while others flattered her, canonizing her as yet more evidence of Kurdistan’s progress. Some labeled her a feminist, while others rejected her version of liberation. Helly began receiving death threats, the worst of which came from her own relatives, she says, those who had never left Iraqi Kurdish villages. “I got a call from my mother begging me to come home. She said, ‘They are looking for you.’ She was talking about relatives in my village. She said thirty men got up and said, ‘If we don’t kill Helly, then we will pay someone to kill her for us.’”

Helly began to wonder if her euphoria over returning to her homeland wasn’t naïve. Religious fundamentalism is downplayed in coverage of Iraqi Kurdistan—the political leadership is secular and its success in developing as a nation is directly linked to the region’s stability—but violence against women, including honor killings, remains a fact of Kurdish life. “I’ve never cried as much as I did during that time,” she says. “I was never in such a dark place.” In private, Helly became a recluse, flanked by security on the occasions she did leave Erbil’s luxury hotels.

In public, though, she laid the groundwork for her image as a feminist peshmerga pop star. “I am the first female Kurdish revolutionary,” she said to one Kurdish newspaper When the host of a local television show be rated her for wearing skimpy clothing, Helly was calm, almost condescending in her response. “I told him, ‘I am a pop star,’” she recalls. “I am not going to become an international star if I wear the hijab, you know.”

Later in 2013, everything changed. The peshmerga began fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Money was tight, and anxiety over security permeated Kurdish society. Kurds worried that their hard-won progress would be lost in a war. Already hundreds of thousands of IDPs were streaming in, living in camps, begging at stoplights, and sleeping at the sites of construction projects whose employees had fled.

For a brief moment, the fight seemed to highlight the need for an independent Kurdish state, and “Risk It All” resonated. But after a few months of hard fighting and casualties, as oil companies began to pull their staff out of the region, Helly’s hit began to seem passé, prewar. She kept up her profile, visiting refugees and peshmerga, courting the attention of local media, and moving forward with a quest to save Erbil’s zoo animals, among them the lion from “Risk It All.” ISIS had raised the stakes, but Helly was convinced she was up to the challenge.

Pop music, in spite of its featherlight feel, has often addressed tough issues like race and war. Why not terrorism? Helly had dressed up like a female peshmerga in “Risk It All,” but at that point they hadn’t fought for decades. By the time she began working on “Revolution,” the peshmerga were heroes once again. Politicians angled for photo-ops on the front lines. Concerts were organized on their behalf. And a great many musicians—Helly Luv’s peers and competition, many of them born and raised in Kurdistan—recorded songs glorifying them. In one popular music video, a handsome singer gels his hair in front of a mirror before driving a luxury car to the front lines. He plans to join the Kurdish forces in their fight against ISIS, seeming to mistake the soldiers for a 1990s-era boy band.

“Revolution” is outrageous, but it’s also, relative to most of this other output, realistic. “I hate seeing videos made here with the peshmerga in the back, just standing there,” Helly tells me. “I want to show the strength of the peshmerga. There are no other fighters like them, and I felt like that was not coming out anywhere, especially not in music videos.” On Mother’s Day last year, Helly posted an old photo on Instagram and Twitter of her mother in her peshmerga uniform, squinting into the sun, her gun at her side and her thick, black hair falling past her waist. “Mom, you look badass!!!!!!!” she wrote, interspersing her words with emoji. “This just reminds me, why I never won those arguments with you! … But on a serious note …. looking at this picture I realize how much pain you saw fighting for freedom, independence and [a] better future for your country and for your child. Your fighter spirit lives in [me] today.” The photo, which received thousands of likes, had a clear between-the-lines message aimed at Kurdish pop rivals who might try to question Helly’s authenticity: “Beat that.”

I made the video and then daesh came. I’ll be honest with you, I’m very lucky.

For “Revolution,” “the first thing I needed was to get real peshmerga,” she tells me. “I needed tanks, but I couldn’t take the tanks or the peshmerga from the war because they had to be on the last outpost fighting against daesh,” she continues, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS. “So we had to go there, to the front line.” She giggles, a little euphoric remembering the danger. “We brought Syrians,” she says. “When daesh came, we had the Syrians run.” At one moment in the video, Helly, dressed in a peshmerga uniform, rushes to rescue a baby from a home under attack. While the shot was still rolling, the child began wailing. “He was very scared,” she says. “I worried about him. We had to do the scene very quickly. I wasn’t sure we got it.”

The video ends with a gathering of civilians from all over the world, marching to join the peshmerga. Dozens of flags of the countries supporting the coalition against ISIS are represented, waved by their citizens, looking like students at a Model United Nations convention. Other video extras carry banners with slogans in Arabic, Kurdish, Farsi, and English supporting freedom and, naturally, revolution. Yazidis, Christians, and other minorities join in. There is a message for the French, who at the time the video was filmed were still mourning the cartoonists killed in the Charlie Hebdo attack: “Egalité, fraternité, liberté,” reads one banner. Another, in Japanese, remembers two hostages beheaded by ISIS. “What I did was perfectly on time,” Helly says. “I made the [“Risk It All”] video and then daesh came. I’ll be honest with you, I’m very lucky.”

Reactions to the new video were mixed: international press latched on to the image of her as a woman fighting ISIS—“Helly Luv is an emblem of the Kurds’ fierce struggle against the Islamic State,” said Le Monde; an American journalist called her “the most badass pop  star we’ve met.” She’s been referenced in articles on everything from slut-shaming to Islamophobia, and she’s outspoken on the enslavement of Yazidi girls by ISIS.

Kurdish outlets were more skeptical of Helly’s politics and influence. The video was a hit among Kurdish viewers, although plenty of them raised concerns, too. Some questioned her inclusion of the Turkish flag and not the Israeli flag in the climactic marching scene, while others called her out on her timing. “She’s using this war on daesh to promote herself and her ‘brand,’” wrote a YouTube commenter. At least one viewer was merely confused. “It looks like she’s promoting war and shit,” he wrote. Now that Kurds had gotten what they’d wished for—a pop star representing Kurdistan with potentially global appeal—did they really want it?

“Revolution” and the controversy around it increased Helly’s fame. Since its release, her online following has grown impressively; as of this writing, she’d reached hundreds of thousands of Twitter and Instagram followers, and her Facebook page had close to two million likes. Recent highlights include Instagram photos of Helly in a dreamy embroidered gown in front of the Louvre and sitting on a ledge along the Pont Alexandre III. She referred to the series as “From Paris with Luv.”

But she is also facing a harsh reality of international pop stardom: singing about fighting ISIS will get you on the news, but it will not get you on American radio. In 2015, Helly and her producer, an affable Floridian named Gawain Bracy II, met with an executive at one of the big three record labels who encouraged them to try other, less dangerous subjects than ISIS, Bracy says. Major labels are not eager to take up the banner against terrorism, he supposes. “They are more afraid of getting their building blown up.”

Helly’s forthcoming album, which she and Bracy hoped would be released last fall, is different, Bracy says. “More upbeat, more dance-y, more urban.” It will be to her existing oeuvre what 1989 is to Taylor Swift’s. “Risk It All” and “Revolution” might not even make the cut; Bracy says it depends on whether they make sense within the overall product. “Our goal isn’t to bombard the music industry with political views,” Bracy says. “At the end of the day, she’s a pop artist.”

In August 2013, while in Erbil shooting Mardan, Helly Luv visited the studios of Babylon FM, an Erbil-based radio station, to promote “Risk It All.” Babylon FM is the sonic equivalent of one of Erbil’s megamalls: dazzling, hyper, aimed at Kurdish millennials and their wallets. At the time Helly visited, she was almost completely unknown; filming on the video hadn’t even begun yet.

Watching the sixteen-minute video taken in the studio during the interview is like gazing into a pop-cultural and geopolitical time capsule. Back then, Erbil was a city full of promise. New hotels were springing up by the bunch, the peshmerga were at home getting fat on sugary tea, and oil companies had offices in housing developments called “English Village” or “American Village” designed to push Erbil toward that Dubai-like future of geographic nowhereness. Of being, simply, rich.

“What’s up, my name is Helly Luv. I’m obviously Kurdish,” Helly says to the DJs. She’s wearing a baggy white T-shirt and a backward baseball cap, and is practically bare-faced compared with the Helly of today. One of the DJs, who grew up in Detroit—“I went to the same high school as Eminem,” he brags, laughing. “I used to bust a cap”—has to show her how to speak into the mic. Helly swivels in her chair like an excited kid, and when they play her song, she leads them in a traditional Kurdish dance, apparently unaware that the old-fashioned moves, which involve holding hands in a circle and waving handkerchiefs, seem to make the young DJs self-conscious. When a listener writes in to the radio station’s website saying “awesome beats, mad love,” Helly responds with a high-pitched ululation, another throwback. “There you go,” one of them tells her. “That’s how you celebrate.”

Together, they exude the bravado of young people who feel confident their future is limitless because they’re constantly being told that it is. Their generation has not yet had to contend with a serious military threat and their parents’ struggles under Saddam seem a far-off era, one building block for a future Kurdistan. Although viewers in 2016 will know that their optimism was short-lived, it is deeply felt. Suddenly, one of the DJs has an epiphany. What if Helly collaborated with Pitbull, the rapper? And Pitbull mentioned Kurdistan in one of his songs? All around the world, people who listen to pop music—not the politicians and diplomats whose opinions their parents care so much about, but their people, young people—would know about them. “He could say, ‘Kurdistan, how are you?’” the DJ says. They all laugh, imagining it.