Every day brought another storm. We were united in trying to save our city. But so many of us were being cut down it was difficult to know whether we were fighting or dying together.
One day in early November 2014, as I crossed the street, I ran into Hayri as he emerged from the ruins of a building. He had grown a short beard but he still looked neat and tidy, with the same scarf around his neck. He had been stationed on the front next to mine for a month, a kilometre away, but in all that time I hadn’t seen him. Now he was being redeployed. We looked at each other. Hayri had one hand around his Dragunov and his trigger hand in his pocket. He smiled.
‘Everything good with you, Hayri?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Yes, it’s good, it’s good,’ he said. ‘We are good. And you?’
I told him I was fine.
Hayri was jiggling something metallic in his pocket. He showed me: a clutch of M16 bullets. He said he had found them in a house that he’d helped capture. ‘They were on the floor in a bedroom,’ he said. He wasn’t sure if they had been left behind by dead comrades or by jihadis he had killed.
‘Use them,’ I said. ‘You’ll need them.’
‘You sure you don’t need them?’ he asked me.
We chatted for a little while longer. Then he walked on.
I recall almost every word of that conversation. Every time I met someone, I tried to fix them in my mind and my heart in case I never saw them again. It might not even be a bullet that would take them. My wound, though still raw and bloody, was closing up. But by now all of us were living on the cusp of exhaustion. After two months with only scraps to eat, our flesh lay like sheets over our bones and our eyes were sinking back into their sockets. Tiredness ate at our minds and confused our bodies. One evening, curled up in the base, I woke with a start, my heart bursting. I was sure I had been shot. After checking myself all over and finding nothing, I realised what I was feeling was not a fresh injury but the muscle memory of being caught in an RPG shockwave. This went on for months.
To keep my focus, I tried to eliminate everything from my life but the craft. Planning, watching, firing; cleaning, building, hiding; deceiving, breathing, withstanding – this became my character. A rifle is a machine with an unswerving function, fast and powerful, speaking only when it must. To be right with the rifle, to be its friend and comrade, I had to be the same: just being and acting. I went for days with my mind blank and my mouth shut. It wasn’t that I had nothing to say. It was that I had found a different way to say it.
But everybody has their limits. Once, after a long day watching the street, I saw a jihadi walking towards me. There was something disgusting about this man. Under his headdress he had yellow teeth and eyes, his mouth seemed to be in the middle of his face, and he was covered in filth. He was acting crazily, just strolling in front of his curtain in the middle of the road. Just at the moment when I had his head in my crosshairs, he turned to look at me. I was about to fire when suddenly I heard the word ‘Rojbas’.
I looked up to see a comrade looking down at me.
‘Why did you disturb me?’ I demanded. ‘Why didn’t you let me kill him?’
He looked around the empty room. ‘Who?’ he said.
I sat up. I was under a blanket in a corner of a room. My rifle was leaning up against the wall beside me.
I was far from the only one corroded by fatigue and hunger. I began to observe a new phenomenon among a few of my comrades. When we were waiting for the next battle, everyone would be vigilant, kept awake for days by the terror in our imaginations. But the moment a fight started, the instant we could see the shape of the next attack and even that there was a possibility of living through it, some would relax and fall asleep, right there in the middle of a firefight. One time I watched a group of our fighters take it in turns to spray the inside of a room in a building they had just taken over, only to discover that inside it was one of our own, asleep. The man dozed on even after his comrades shot a book-case down on top of him. We were moving forward, of that there was no more doubt. But it was an open question how many of us were even capable of reaching the finish.
In mid-November the Islamists introduced a new tactic that seemed to speak of an impatience with our resistance. I was making new holes for a sniper’s nest high up on the top floor of a wrecked building one afternoon, trying to work out how to be safe behind a wall that had a giant five-metre crack in it, when suddenly the gaps in the wall on either side of me exploded with ricochets. All along the front I could hear what sounded like a huge firecracker, a rolling crack-crack-crack that lasted several seconds.
Almost immediately, voices began screaming for assistance on the radio. When I went to investigate, I found every base had been hit. There were pools of blood on the floor in every position we held. Comrades were pushing past me, ferrying out the wounded and the dead. What had happened?
We concluded that ISIS’ commanders had instructed every one of their men to fire all their guns at once. They had unleashed a deadly volley along the entire front. Ten of our men and women perished in the fusillade. Another thirty were injured. With so many bullets fired at the same time, some found unlikely trajectories. One of our team commanders was shot and killed when a round that had already travelled several hundred metres passed through a hole in a wall and then a tiny gap between two sandbags. It hit him right in the forehead.
Most of us viewed ISIS’ new strategy as another obstacle with which we had to cope. But Herdem saw it as something we could turn to our advantage. Why not use ISIS’ tactic against them? he asked. Why not make it even more deadly, so that we fired into their gun holes not just along one front but across the whole city? Four days later we did just that, firing every weapon we possessed at a prearranged signal on the radio. I emptied several magazines. It was devastating. We killed scores of jihadis and wounded many more. You could hear them screaming and panicking all along the line. A few days later we did it again, then again, then again. I don’t know why the jihadis never repeated the tactic against us. But we were happy to steal it from them.
*
Day by day, week by week, we inched forward. In late November, Herdem’s voice came on the radio, asking me where I was. I told him I was in a tall building close to an old girls’ school which at that time marked the beginning of no-man’s-land. An hour later, Herdem found me. With him was a new comrade with a boyish face, blue eyes and ginger hair whom he introduced as Servan. Herdem took me aside. ‘He’s very polite, a very good person, very honest and quiet,’ he said. ‘He can also hit targets extremely well. But he has no sense of tactics and doesn’t understand bases or keeping himself safe. I need you to teach him.’
I was doubtful. Servan seemed to have the calmness and patience of a good sniper. But I could see just from looking at him that he had no feel for the psychological side – the ability to calculate, analyse and manipulate. Despite my misgivings, I found myself warming to him. After more than two months of shooting and deceiving and lying in the dirt, there was something refreshing about Servan’s pure nature. You felt you had no choice but to protect such innocence.
The next morning, when I woke at half past four, Servan was already up and waiting. We walked together to the front, leaning into an incline and a wild wind that was rushing through the streets. Our new target was the Black School, which stood on a hill with a wide view over the city and which had earned its name from the black mesh barricades nailed across its windows. It was another building of huge strategic value. If we captured it, we would control more than half the city.
Once we arrived at the front, I told Servan to stay put in a tall four-storey building under the control of a women’s team commanded by a YPJ leader called Sama. I was going to check along the front for firing positions that would allow us to target the Black School and another nearby college in ISIS hands. I was ascending the staircase of a building next to the college when I heard several dozen ISIS fighters shout their war cry: ‘Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!’ The chorus came from around two hundred and fifty metres away and was followed by the noise of an arsenal of guns firing. The Islamists were making a fresh attack.
I ran to the roof and hurried towards the parapet. Abruptly, ISIS stopped firing. That was the signal for around twenty jihadis to appear in the street three or four blocks away, yelling and running towards our lines. Another ten were running across the rooftops.
I lay down and fixed my scope to two hundred and fifty metres. The jihadis filled my sights. I started shooting into them, once, then again, then a third time. Two or three collapsed while they ran, to be trampled by the others. A dozen or so reached the college and started sprinting across the playground. They were heading for one of our teams but, out in the open, had no cover. I continued to fire at them as they went. Another down. And another.
They were running over each other now.
I took down another.
And another.
I switched to the figures on the roof. I took one more. Then a second. A third to the side.
I switched back to the playground. The jihadis were scattering for cover behind a small wall and shouting at each other to fetch their fallen comrades. Then they began running back towards their lines. I hit one of the bigger ones in his side as he ran away from me. He pirouetted around and dropped to the ground. A friend grabbed him under his shoulders and tried to drag him off. I hit him too. By now several of my comrades were also firing, including one on a BKC and another on a mini Dushka. A few more Islamists fell. Then they were gone and the attack was over.
I was ecstatic. I had shot twelve jihadis in two minutes. What an opportunity! The right place. The precise time. Even if I was wounded, I could still be part of it. I was still effective.
After a while, I remembered that Servan wasn’t with me. I descended the building and went to find Sama. She told me Servan was above her on the top floor. I climbed up. On the higher floors of this building almost the entire facade had been obliterated. What remained was punctured by holes the size of basketballs. Instinctively, I threw myself to the ground and tried to find cover. Servan, I noticed, was lying directly behind one of the holes, his rifle protruding into the street.
‘Servan!’ I shouted. ‘You can’t lie there! Move away! Get out of there!’
Servan got up and ambled over to me.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘Making a base,’ he said. I saw that he had piled up four mattresses behind the hole he had chosen.
‘That’s not a base,’ I told him. ‘That’s a target. You’re right behind a hole. Even someone with a pistol could hit you there. If any ISIS spots you, you’re done.’
Now Servan looked worried. ‘How do I make a real base?’ he asked.
I spent the next hour instructing Servan. I showed him how to stuff the holes with pillows so that his position was concealed. Even then, I told him, he was not to stand behind any hole. I showed him how to build a platform out of shelves and pillows. I told him to set it a few metres back from a small hole and right at the top of the wall, just below the ceiling. ‘They’re unlikely to shoot the holes at the top as they can’t imagine how anyone could be lying down just below the ceiling,’ I explained.
Servan was excited by what he was learning. ‘Great!’ he kept saying. ‘Great!’ Once I was sure he knew what to do, I went downstairs to talk to Sama. When I came back up, to my amazement Servan had nearly finished his base. ‘I used to be a builder in Aleppo,’ he grinned. Once he was done, Servan built me a base too, on the other side of the building.
We stayed in our building for three days. Nothing was moving. On the third afternoon I heard a noise that sent an electric shock through my stomach. Scanning the horizon, I saw a familiar outline in the distance, crossing the street from one side to the other, billowing black smoke and crushing debris beneath it. I froze. It was the first time I had seen a tank in Kobani. What could rifle rounds do against that?
I grabbed my radio and asked for Haqi. When he came on, I blurted out, ‘There’s a tank, between the Black School and the college! It could obliterate us all!’ I requested he talk to the coalition about an immediate air strike.
From its position on the hill next to the Black School, the tank would be able to fire down on a large section of our front. I made a quick calculation. There was no doubt the tank could blast Servan and I out of our vantage point high up in our buildings. But because its barrel couldn’t dip below the horizontal, it would have more difficulty hitting the fighters below us.
‘Everybody down to the ground now!’ I shouted.
I stayed on the top floor. Sama arrived with an RPG and a bag of rockets. ‘The air strike won’t make it in time,’ she said. She ran to the roof.
I could hear the tank moving again. I thought I could see a plume of black smoke behind the Black School. To the side of the building was an abandoned, rusty yellow combine harvester. From behind the harvester came more noise and another jet of black smoke, then the tank’s nose rumbled into view. Its barrel swung around until it seemed to be pointed directly at me.
Fire spat from the barrel. The shell flew towards us and crashed into the floor below. The building shook like the branch of a tree. When the dust cleared, I caught sight of the tank backing up and disappearing again. But after a few seconds I heard it advancing once more. As soon as it appeared, it fired again, this time directly towards Sama. The shell went wide. Through a crack in the floor above me, I saw Sama drop to her knee with the RPG over her shoulder. She fired.
Her grenade missed by inches and slammed into the harvester. Sama, shrouded in dust, immediately reloaded and fired again. Then again. Then one more time. All her shots slammed into the harvester. By this time I had run up to the roof and was racing across to her.
‘Wait!’ I shouted. ‘You’re hitting the harvester! The tank is to the left.’
We waited for the dust to clear. But the tank had gone. A fighter jet screamed overhead. Half an hour later, a predator drone began circling. We never saw the tank again. But for the rest of our time in Kobani, we all felt its presence around the corner.
Come late November, ahead of our planned advance on the Black School, coalition planes had been hitting ISIS’ lines for days, raining down five-hundred-pound bombs guided by our spotters on the ground. Watching the planes from below, we could feel the world coalescing behind us. A month later, after two Islamists massacred twelve journalists and staff members at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, we watched as a French female pilot screamed overhead all night, bombing ISIS in run after run. She radioed our air coordinator on the ground. ‘I am a member of the YPJ too,’ she declared.
The air strikes were devastating. One rocket could blow a hole the size of a swimming pool in a building. The detonations would send eruptions of dust and debris hundreds of metres into the sky. Even if the jihadis survived, many would be deaf, blind and numb. Even so, this remained a street war. ISIS not only held its ground, often the jihadis counter-attacked during the strikes, trying to mingle with our forces so the strikes would stop. You had to respect their courage. Hundreds of them were vaporised but they were not giving up.
Once we reckoned the jihadis had been pummelled enough from the air, our teams would advance on foot. At this stage, the strikes would become as much a risk to us. Crossing no-man’s-land on the southern front one day, five of our men and women were killed by an errant bomb. There was also no way of knowing where ISIS had set mines or hidden pockets of fighters. And now that the jihadis were in retreat, sniping was becoming one of their favoured tactics. Rather than give cover from the rear, I began to advance with commanders directing the attacks. As he or she went forward, I tried to shoot down any Islamists fleeing the bombardment or staying behind in no-man’s-land. There were always a few die-hards.
The Black School attack was no different. We set off up the hill on a dark night in late November. As we were advancing, a coalition bomb wounded three of our fighters. To my left, one of our snipers cut down three jihadis holding out in the front yard of the Black School. After suffering a few more casualties and killing some more jihadis, we took the building. I’m sure I took my share of shots and kills, but now I struggle to remember how many. For weeks it had been just steady, methodical slaughter. When I try to recall that time, what I remember most is a vague feeling of rhythmic accomplishment.