By the end of December we had been fighting in Kobani for four months. The days passed unnoticed in a fog of frozen numbness and fatigue. I had been shooting from the roof of the Black School for more than five weeks and it was becoming hard to remember an existence prior to trudging up and down those stairs, staring out at the same buildings in the same streets. Fighting exhaustion had become so routine that it had bled into an inability to sleep. Every time I curled up on the ground, I prepared myself for hours of wrestling my pinched, nervy body, trying to convince it to rest.
Much of the fighting could be seen from the hills in Turkey across the border. On New Year’s Eve, some of the Kurds who had fled the city and who had watched the battles progress street by street began letting off fireworks. Was it a gesture of support? A celebration? With all the journalists also stationed on those hills, training their cameras on us, sometimes it felt like we were gladiators in a circus.
Still, the more surreal and disorientating Kobani became, there were always some comrades you could count on to keep their heads. Travelling to Kobani from Jazaa four months earlier, I’d gone with a small group that included Serhad. To reach Kobani, we had had to hike for several hours over frozen ground, crawl under a border fence, run past a couple of Turkish border patrols, then travel west for hours in an old bus. Serhad had done the entire journey, twenty-four hours without a break, with a fresh gunshot wound in his stomach.
By mid-December, Serhad was fully healed and in command of a group of six young enthusiastic volunteers, whom I nicknamed the Young Wolves. The Wolves were never far from the action. After our latest advance, they were basing themselves in a house to the south of the Black School that looked directly at ISIS’ positions. The Wolves, I knew, were energetic and smart, surrounding their positions with broken tiles and glass and sheets of corrugated iron so that they would hear anyone approaching. But they valued their independence and often didn’t respond to radio checks. Around 1 a.m. one night, with the temperature around minus five or so, I saw a figure run towards their building. As I shifted my aim to their position, I saw a second figure dart across the street. I was about to fire when I thought better of it and decided to radio Serhad first. When I described what I was seeing, he replied, ‘Don’t shoot! That’s us!’ It was a lesson in how I needed to understand our own people as well as I understood the enemy.
A day or so later, around noon and in broad daylight, the jihadis attacked the Wolves’ position in full force. Hearing the firefight, I ran over to their base. By the time I arrived, the Wolves had already cut down six Islamists, three right at the doorstep of their base, where their bodies now lay slumped.
The Wolves’ base was little more than rubble. There were RPG holes in the walls, and bullets and shrapnel had turned what remained into something approaching a giant sieve. But my comrades were unharmed. I made my way upstairs to find Serhad, who had fashioned a position out of a collapsed staircase. He was sitting stock-still with his neck stretched out and his rifle pointed out through a small hole at the houses across the street. ‘Good that you came, Azad,’ he said, without lifting his eyes. ‘About twenty to twenty-five of them attacked. We killed three in the street and three up against our own wall. There’s about fifteen of them left.’
I sat next to him and readied my rifle. Once both of us were still, I realised the jihadis were so close that I could hear them talking.
‘There’s a guy hiding in the front yard opposite,’ Serhad whispered.
I moved my scope to where Serhad was indicating. There was a small copse. Dangling from the branches of the trees were hundreds of strips of cloth, apparently a kind of camouflage meant to simulate leaves.
‘The guy has a mask on,’ Serhad continued. ‘He’s moving around, trying to see what’s happening. I think he’s coordinating the attack, trying to get his men inside our building. He looked right at me two times. But he doesn’t fire, as he’s trying to hide.’
I told Serhad I couldn’t see the man.
‘Watch this,’ said Serhad.
He fired a single shot.
Something moved. Next to the end of a wall, I could just make out a pair of eyes looking back at us. As I brought my crosshairs down to his head, however, they disappeared.
We lay there, waiting for the man to reappear. After a while, Serhad said, ‘I can hear them talking inside that house two blocks over to the left.’
I swung my Dragunov in the building’s direction. In a driveway I saw a man in a YPG uniform peering inside an abandoned jeep as though trying to work out if there was anything in it worth taking. ‘YPG or ISIS?’ I whispered to Serhad.
Serhad glanced at the man. ‘ISIS,’ he replied. ‘All the comrades are inside.’
I fixed my sights on the man. He was three hundred metres away. It was a clean shot.
One …
Two …
My bullet hit him in the right lung. He screamed and jumped in the air. His rifle, which he was carrying in his hands, spun backwards and landed on the ground. Somehow, the man landed on his feet.
One …
Two …
My second shot hit his left lung. He fell backwards onto a pile of rubble.
All around, the Young Wolves were cheering. ‘Biji biji Y-P-G! Biji biji Y-P-J! [Long live YPG! Long live YPJ!]’ they shouted.
There was no way for the jihadi to escape. He was in pain, probably dying. We could hear him crying out. Then, as Serhad and I watched, his left arm moved. He seemed to be trying to push himself up. He scrabbled around with his hands until he found two pieces of concrete, then pushed down on them to raise himself up, before finally sitting back on his knees.
Now I could see that my target was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his late thirties. He was tanned, athletic and healthy, with a full head of long black hair and a short beard that he kept neatly trimmed around his thick lips. I had hit him once in either lung, one shot just above his heart, one slightly below it. A small trickle of blood ran from each wound. Beneath his strong arching eyebrows he had calm brown eyes. He was looking directly at me and his expression was composed and unafraid. He knew who he was and what path he had chosen and that he had reached its end. He did not beg. He did not surrender. He accepted his fate. And as I watched this man, proud in death, without fear or regret, I realised that with all that we stood for, all our fine words about conduct and progression and morality, and everything we said about the Islamists’ savagery and regression, in that moment I was being taught a lesson in dignity by a jihadi.
I fixed my sights on the point between his two eyebrows. His right arm started to lift his rifle. I moved my finger to my trigger. He raised his weapon until it was almost level. I held his eyes until the last moment.
After it was done, Serhad let me lie there behind my gun for a while.
Then he said, ‘The other guy is back,’ and fired off a burst. The man went down and we heard a choking sound.
We waited half an hour. A coalition jet flew overhead and fired several rockets into the ISIS positions. We waited some more, then went over to check the bodies. I had hit mine between the eyes. Serhad had shot his through the Adam’s apple.
Three weeks later, on the morning of 27 January 2015, we liberated Kobani.
The day before had been an uncertain one. Thick black smoke had hung over the entire front like a dark blanket in the sky. Haqi had radioed around to tell everyone to be prepared. ‘They’re setting fire to the entire city,’ he said. ‘It’s a full-frontal attack.’ I positioned myself in a minaret to protect the teams who were advancing. But my suspicion was that the fires were to cover the jihadis’ retreat. The smoke lasted all day. No one fired at us. Finally, Haqi radioed again. The last surviving jihadis were pulling out of Kobani.
The next morning, one by one, our men and women began to emerge from their bases and walk through the streets. They walked to the edge of the city. Covering the teams that I could see, I watched one walk right through to the outskirts of the city and into the fields beyond. Then another made it, then another. The city was ours. After watching a fourth team walk clean out of the city, I radioed Haqi and said I wanted to join them. ‘I need to be part of this,’ I said. ‘I’ve been dreaming of this moment. I want to feel how it is to put my feet on the ground.’
‘Be my guest,’ replied Haqi.
I descended the minaret, slung my rifle on my shoulder and walked down the middle of a street that I had been watching and observing for all these months. I felt like I had wings. Some of our men and women were still checking the last houses for any remaining ISIS. But most of us just looked at each other. Around me, comrades were crying. Others were dancing and singing. There was a lot of shooting in the air. Everywhere I saw dusty, exhausted faces, long, straggly beards, and red eyes, smiling, laughing and crying at the same time. It was an explosion of freedom. A documentary crew found Herdem in the street, his gun slung across his back, reeling with happiness. ‘Kobani is not sad any more,’ he proclaimed. ‘Kobani’s heart is no longer burning. Kobani can be proud once more and hold her head high. Let the world witness this day! People of Kobani! We have claimed our city back!’
A comrade who knew me approached. ‘Heval, you are smiling!’ he exclaimed. He was right. I hadn’t smiled for months. I thought about that for days afterwards. In many ways, it was hard to digest the enormity of what we had achieved. With our old guns and a few hundred men and women we had stopped the most ruthless, richest and best-equipped militia in the world. ISIS had terrorised the region, abused the name of God, and murdered, tortured, raped and destroyed for years. Their medieval malevolence had seemed unstoppable. They had called a bluff on all the good in the world. But we had stopped them. Then, step by step, building by building, we had pushed them back. We had broken the spell of ISIS’ invincibility and the world could breathe again. It was a new beginning for the Kurds and for the world.
But what price had we paid? We had lost thousands. The jihadis had also left their mark on those of us who survived. They had made us killers. They had forced us to live as animals. They had made us love our friends more fiercely than most human beings can ever know, then forced us to watch them die. I had taken so many lives that I now did it without thinking, sometimes without even remembering. Even if we managed to rebuild Rojava and restore some normality, how could we, the fighters who had saved it, ever be a part of it?
I came across Zahra with a group of volunteers, raising our flag on a hill overlooking the city. As ever, she greeted me with a smile. But for the first time since I had known her, she allowed sadness into her voice. ‘I just wish all our friends could have been here to see this day,’ she said. ‘Only a few days ago I was talking to some of them about what we would do to celebrate. None of them made it to this day. They should be here too.’
I climbed up the tallest building I could find, one of the southernmost in the city. There I put my rifle down, took my jacket off, then my shoes and socks, until I was stripped to the waist, just to feel the openness and the freedom. Our commanders were shouting on the radio: ‘Take up positions! Build bases! This is a very important moment! We could be attacked at any time!’ But nobody was listening. Everyone was just wandering around and feeling the thrill of liberation. The city echoed with their release.
When I climbed down, I realised I was feeling uneasy. I think part of me was afraid of the celebrations, of letting go of the will and determination that had got us through the past four months. During our training, they had taught us to be wary of the time after a victory. ‘You lose more people after a success,’ our instructor had said. ‘You forget yourselves, you lower your guard and you become vulnerable. Happiness exposes you.’ When I ran into a young YPJ fighter from Kobani handing out chocolate and what she called ‘the sweets of liberation’, I snapped at her. ‘We haven’t even cleared the city yet,’ I reminded her. ‘After that there’s the villages, the farms, the rest of West Kurdistan, then North and East Kurdistan.’
The woman’s face dropped. I immediately regretted my words. ‘Come, come,’ I said. ‘Don’t stop. Let’s celebrate.’
But she replied, ‘No, you are right. We need to liberate more. We need to go on.’ And she put away the sweets and walked away.
All afternoon I wandered around the city in a daze. As evening approached, I turned a corner and was stunned to see a family – a mother and her two children who seemed to have chosen the first possible moment to return. They appeared dumbfounded by the devastation around them. So much of what they knew was gone. I could see them struggling to imagine the diabolical forces that had transformed the city into the ruin it now was.
I couldn’t help staring back at them. For months I had been crawling through the grey, funereal, frozen dust of the dead. It lay across the city like a shroud. Now here were the colours of life: a mother in a bright-blue traditional Kurdish dress, her children in pink, red and blue silks. I felt like I was looking at a distant memory.
I sat down in a doorway, my rifle across my lap, and watched that family until night fell. My mind had held my heart at bay for so long. Watching this family and others like them, I told myself, was how my heart would begin to repair the space between them.
The day after Kobani’s liberation, I had my first shower in months. I warmed the water using an old oil heater in a house we were using, then stood there for what seemed like hours, soaping and washing, soaping and washing. I hadn’t felt so clean since swimming in the river outside Sardasht as a boy.
Around noon, a call came over the radio for the snipers to assemble at our base in the city. It was a strange reunion. Herdem, Yildiz, Hayri, Nasrin and I each could have talked for months. Inside my head, it felt so loud. But it was not the time, and if we began with our stories, none of us knew when we would stop. So we just sat silently together, touching each other on the shoulder, peaceful and calm and happy to be in our group of five again.
After a while, Herdem and Yildiz stood and faced us. Of our original seventeen snipers, they said, four were badly wounded, four had lost their minds and one, Servan, was dead. Eight of us had survived, and for us, Herdem said, there would be no let-up. We all needed to return to the war immediately as our forces pushed south from the city into the countryside. ‘We have freed the city,’ he said. ‘But Kobani is in a very weak position. ISIS is waiting outside and they want it back. We need to move to the villages as soon as we can to deny ISIS the space to counter-attack.’
Yildiz added that outside Kobani lay three hundred and seventy-four villages that needed to be recaptured. The terrain would be largely flat. Our new targets would be a series of gently sloping hills that held height advantage over the surrounding area and on which ISIS had built fortified bases. We should expect to encounter these redoubts all the way to the Euphrates to the west and the border of Iraq to the east.
I spoke up. From Jazaa, I had experience of sniping in villages. ‘It’s mobile, and lots of walking,’ I said. ‘Not sitting and watching life and death through a hole like we’ve been doing for the last four months. Now we’re going to be able to see the sky. Now we’ll have room to roam.’
Everyone laughed at that. I suppose it was funny. But it was also true that we had been living our whole lives through these tiny holes, and our minds had narrowed as a result. It had affected my vision, too. For weeks after Kobani I would find myself spooking people by talking to them with one eye closed, as though I were lining up a shot. Even today I’ll walk down a street in London or Leeds and catch myself scanning windows for sniper nests and sizing up passers-by.
I asked to rejoin Haqi and Serhad on the western front, pushing towards the Euphrates, which marked the traditional border of Kurdistan, in whose waters I had begun to dream of washing my face. The others said they were happy to take the eastern and southern fronts. Once our deployments were agreed, we cooked some rice and beans, and ate. It was the last time Herdem, Yildiz, Hayri, Nasrin and I would be together.