The night after my briefing from Tolin, we set out to cross the ISIS frontline. For five hours we crawled silently on the ground and ducked between the houses, following a guide who was equipped with one of our few night-vision scopes. As we approached ISIS’ positions, we could hear them in houses on either side of us. We tried to move slowly and carefully to avoid making noise but we also had to cross before the sun came up and revealed us to the enemy. Twice we had to back-track after nearly walking into a jihadi base. Several times we had to wait for their sentries to pass. Finally, we passed the last house on the outskirts of town and sprinted for cover in the fields beyond.
Just before dawn, we found an abandoned village on a hill twelve kilometres inside ISIS territory in which we hoped to hide ourselves without being discovered. Below us, about six hundred metres away, was the main road from Kobani to Aleppo. All day we watched the jihadis drive up and down in their pickups and motorbikes, so close I could distinguish them by the length of their beards. But attacking them when they were together would have meant a very quick death. Our mission was to stay concealed and send out small teams of two or three on sabotage and assassination missions several kilometres away from where we were hiding.
For two weeks, we crawled in the dirt, sweating through the day and freezing all night. Within a few days, everyone was sick with flu and fever. But we also had success. A de-mining team that was part of our group rewired an old device, then detonated it under one of their pickups. When the jihadis arrived to investigate, we killed all four of them, then hid their bodies to confuse the Islamists further. We shot another two on a motorbike, then stowed their bodies and their bike under a bridge. We would hear the shouts of confusion as their friends arrived to find them dead so far from the frontline.
One day, all seventy of us were hiding in the village when a BMW camouflaged with mud sped in from the countryside and skidded to a halt under a large mulberry tree perhaps five metres in front of us. Inside were two ISIS fighters, dressed in black with long beards. They stepped out of the car and began scanning the sky. Overhead, we could hear one of the two American fighter jets which had begun patrolling the skies above Kobani in the past week.
The way we were positioned, we were already surrounding the car. We were deliberating whether or not to shoot, and give away our position, when a shot rang out from one of our units – and after that, we all opened up. One of the jihadis died instantly: he turned out to be a general with valuable information on a memory stick in his pocket. The driver, a tiny man, scurried behind a small stone wall, then ran into a house behind it shouting, ‘Surrender if you want to live!’ There were seventeen volunteers inside that house waiting for him, their guns leveled at the door. That tiny man flew back out of the house and landed in the garden.
After two weeks of harassing, sabotaging and killing as deep as twenty kilometres behind ISIS’ frontline, our last mission was to inflict a final humiliation on the Islamists by heading back to Kobani and, coordinating with comrades inside the town, attacking them from behind as our other forces harassed them from the front. We moved silently in three teams – one to my left, one to my right and my team in the centre – radioing ahead to our forces inside Kobani to fire so as to distract the jihadis, allowing us to surprise them from behind.
After four hours, shortly after 1 a.m. we found ourselves walking by moonlight through the olive farms and farmhouses below Mistenur Hill. This was the strategic gateway to Kobani. As we rounded a cluster of boulders on its lower slopes, we could see the entire town before us. Descending into the streets again felt like stepping out into the ocean. The sound of gunfire up ahead – Kalashnikovs, Dushkas, RPGs – became constant. Bullets began splitting the air over our heads. Black smoke soon enveloped us, choking us but covering our advance. Deeper and deeper we marched. On the right, one of our units came across a house of jihadis and killed six of them. On the left, there was another firefight, with the same result. All of a sudden the Islamists seemed to realise they were being encircled. We heard shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar’. For a few minutes, they fought intensely. Three of our volunteers were injured but we returned fire and killed five of them. After that, the remaining Islamists seemed to lose heart. The gunfire stopped. As we walked on, moving house to house, we found empty buildings and abandoned trenches.
Shortly before dawn, we crossed back over our lines. In the first position we came to, we found two YPJ fighters facing us. These two women were holed up together in a house, alone, almost out of ammunition, their radio dead and their eyes red from exhaustion. They said they had been there for four days, part of a thin line holding out against attacks that could last seven hours at a time. Of our original force of four hundred and fifty, the two women said scores, possibly more than a hundred, had died in the days we had been away. On either side of them, they knew of only seven survivors. We relieved them, pulling desks and refrigerators across the doors and mining the front garden. And almost without anyone noticing, the smoke lifted and the light of morning broke over Kobani.
Before us lay our new frontline, one block further south than when I had arrived. I was free to walk north through the streets. Everywhere my comrades were preparing new defences, digging trenches, filling sandbags and pillows, knocking new firing holes in the houses. It was hard not to feel a small sense of triumph. A few days earlier, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan had predicted that Kobani would fall to ISIS within hours. We had proved him wrong. Though we had gained just one street, we had stopped them and turned them around. Possibility rippled through our people like a wind through grass. If we had done it once, we could do it again.
All the time I was behind enemy lines, I had been without a sniper’s rifle. The morning I crossed back over, I tried to find my way to the snipers’ base to equip myself. That was when I met the others.
The first I encountered was Herdem. I was in the street talking with Tolin when he strode up and interrupted. ‘Walk out of the back of that building,’ he said to me, pointing to a ruined house across the street, ‘turn to the right and there is a burned-out black van parked in front of a house. That’s where we have our headquarters. I’ll see you there.’ That was Herdem’s way of saying hello.
I had heard of Herdem before I arrived. He had been in Kobani since the start of the war and had become something of a legend. In the months ahead, a Turkish photographer from a French news agency would take a series of portraits of him crouching in the ruins of the city, his black beanie pulled down low over his forehead, his black Dragunov slung across his back. The images would become famous, turning Herdem into a latter-day Che Guevara, a symbol of freedom to millions. The pictures captured Herdem as I knew him: sharp, intense, silent and alone. In the years since, other photographs have emerged of a younger man laughing in a meadow of flowers, shaking the hand of a general or playing a lyre on a rooftop, his Dragunov lying next to him on the tiles. I’d like to have met that other Herdem. The one I knew fought every hour of every day.
I followed Herdem’s directions to the snipers’ base, which turned out to be an equipment store for the sharp-shooters of both the YPG and YPJ. There I met a broad-shouldered woman with her black hair tied in a ponytail and a pronounced cow-lick that was turning grey. She introduced herself as Yildiz, commander of the YPJ’s snipers. If Herdem was gruff and monosyllabic, Yildiz was the opposite. She immediately engaged me in a discussion on the tactics of building bases, arguing that when we were advancing there wasn’t always time to sandbag a nest. ‘Just throw a few empty sandbags on yourself and hide in the rubble,’ she said. ‘It’s much smarter. People get stuck into one way of doing things and we need to remember always to be flexible.’
As the leaders of our snipers, Herdem and Yildiz made a point of visiting their shooters on the frontline. Herdem would generally stick to issuing commands. Yildiz always seemed like she was dropping in for a chat. One day she found me only a few hundred metres from the enemy, reached up to me with a glass of hot black tea and suddenly started talking about the art of making infusions, how there were different teas with different tastes and strengths and colours, and how it made such a difference whether you used an electric kettle or a smoky wood fire and whether the water was from a tap or fresh from a spring. I used to relish these monologues – about tea or the value of a good pair of combat trousers or the beauty and peace of a morning fog. They were diverting and refreshing and, for the briefest of moments, I was transported to another time and place. But with Yildiz, there was always a lesson for the present. When I laughed and complimented her on how much she knew about tea, Yildiz replied that the point was that the harder and more creatively you worked for it, the better the tea. It was the same with defending Kobani, she said. The more care you took, the more effort you made, the better the result.
I understood that Yildiz’s chatter was also her attempt to distract us. There were a number of subjects no sniper would ever discuss. We never talked about the fragility of our endeavour, for instance. Eight months of fighting had taught us all that there was no meritocracy in war. On the days when death came and snatched a life to the left of you and another few to the right, it was tempting to imagine it was working to a scheme, the way a sculptor whittles away the extraneous and leaves only the fine and necessary. But that was a delusion. I had seen the best warriors fall in the first shots of battle. I had seen the least experienced pass through the fiercest fights unscathed. Death could be a brave sacrifice or a lowly accident. Alexander the Great conquered most of the world only to be bitten by a malarial mosquito. A day’s drive west of Rojava was the Saleph river in which Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa died, an old man who had won innumerable battles dragged under the water by the weight of his own chain mail. There was no predictability to war, no logic to death, and no arguing with any of it. Death took, tirelessly and carelessly. You couldn’t explain it, and to discuss it was pointless. You could only accept it.
The war required us to live with unpredictability. Faced with chaos, the only real plan is to have no plan. Fear is what you don’t know, whether it’s war or ISIS or death, and by Kobani we were acquainted well enough with all three not to be surprised by any of them. Practising, learning, adapting, the craft of life and death – that was how you found purpose and focus.
Maybe our facility for calm concentration was one reason why the five of us – Hayri, Herdem, Yildiz, Nasrin and I – had survived long enough to find ourselves in the same place at the same time. It was certainly true that when we were together there was a peace to our group. We couldn’t afford a noisy mind. By the nature of the work, we were quiet loners. Others confronted the enemy face to face. We floated above, moving from unit to unit and commander to commander. They fired as they had to. We fired when we chose to. We depended almost entirely on ourselves – and the experience set us apart. We didn’t share. It was months before I learned that Yildiz was originally from North Kurdistan and had been in the movement for years. So at home did Herdem seem in Kobani that it was only years later that I read that he didn’t come from the city but a small village high up in the mountains on the border between Iran and Turkey.
As for Nasrin, I never learned anything about her life before the war. Nasrin was blue-eyed, pale-skinned and short, with a round face marked by sharp wrinkles around her eyes. She always wore a red keffiyeh – a headscarf – blue jeans and a bulky military sweater. Other than that, there was just her commitment and the unspoken measure we had of each other, a bond somehow stronger because we exchanged so few words. She would never talk about what happened at the front or what she had seen or the three times she was wounded, and I never once heard her mention her kills. Those who did speak about killing were generally looking for acceptance or credit. I preferred Nasrin’s silent capability. You could see she had the will. Anything she did, even offering you a cup of tea so the handle faced you, she did with decency and care.
We had two snipers with us who were not fit to fight, one so depressed he couldn’t talk, another, an eighteen-year-old, who complained all the time that he was never sent to the front. I had no time for either. But Nasrin would listen to them like a mother. When I was with her, the two of us often sat in silence, content to be in the company of a comrade who understood. If we spoke, it was to swap tactics or techniques or tips for equipment maintenance. For months, the most I heard her say was that first day at the base when I selected a Dragunov from the rack and she complimented me on my choice, saying the weapon was a favourite of hers as the scope was extremely precise. Everything else – the shots we had made, the expression on an enemy’s face as you pulled the trigger, the youth of some of those we had to take down – we left unsaid.
Perhaps the gentlest among us was Hayri. Hayri had arrived in Kobani with Nasrin and like Yildiz he was from North Kurdistan, though I never knew precisely where. He had a black-and-white scarf which he always wore. I had a similar one in my pack, and Hayri’s way of introducing himself was to take the loose threads hanging from mine and say, ‘You’re knotting these up wrong. You need to make them thinner. Then they’ll look better.’ Then, to show me, he began twisting the threads around each other and tying them.
‘It’s quicker my way,’ I said.
‘But not as pretty,’ he replied, smiling.
Other people would tell me Hayri was a great sniper, a person of discipline and character. Like Nasrin, he never talked about the war or how he handled it. If anyone asked, Hayri would just smile and stare off into the distance. I think, like all of us, he thought killing was abhorrent. But faced with the choice we all faced, us or them, Hayri had made his peace with it. He didn’t need to explain or justify. He took responsibility for what he was doing. And if there was death and dying all around, to Hayri that made it even more important that two comrades who were alive and well greeted each other and shared a moment in each other’s company. Don’t let death consume you, he was saying. Remember life.