Long Shot Read online

  Long Shirt had moved twenty to thirty metres down the hill. I fired the moment I saw him. He went down clutching his head and crying out ‘Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!’ This was their battle cry. But Long Shirt’s voice was weak and I guessed he was bleeding out. Havin ululated back at him. ‘Wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh!’ she sang, using her hand. ‘Wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh! Biji reber Apo! [Long live leader Apo!]’

  To the left, I saw some movement from Skinny. He was on his back. One leg was lying flat on the ground but the other was moving up and down. I fired at the still leg. The other one kept moving, then dropped abruptly to the ground. Skinny was finished.

  We had been in combat for fifty minutes. Four enemy were down. Only Fat Man remained. I asked Havin to fire at the walls behind which he was sheltering. With her first rocket, she hit the corner. The next went over. The third just below. I told Shiro to advance fifty metres down the hill and open fire. Then Fat Man would return fire, and show himself, and I would have him.

  Shiro did as I asked, Fat Man stood up and I fired – but again he was too quick, ducking back down before I could get off my shot. Fat Man was defending himself well. He fascinated me, in a way. His comrades were all dead. But he was not leaving his position.

  Xabat suggested that he and Shiro crawl around behind the base and attack it with grenades. It took them twenty minutes to reach the bottom of the hill. I kept firing so that Fat Man stayed low and did not spot them. But he guessed anyway. When Xabat and Shiro were a hundred metres in front of him, he detonated another mine. From my position, the explosion appeared to go off underneath them. But when the smoke cleared, I could see them crawling uphill, still unharmed.

  ‘How’s it progressing?’ came Medya’s voice on the radio.

  ‘Nearly there,’ I said.

  When our men began circling around behind him, Fat Man heard them. It sent him into a panic. He kept sprinting outside, trying to spot them in the dark, then running back. I was following him and harassing him with short bursts, trying to make it impossible for him to shoot. When Xabat and Shiro were less than thirty metres behind the base, they called me.

  ‘Fire more, please.’

  As I shot several bursts, Xabat and Shiro ran towards the base and threw two grenades inside. There were two explosions. We waited for a minute. Silence.

  I picked up my rifle, walked down the hill and up to the ISIS positions. Skinny, whom I had taken to be the commander, turned out to be the youngest. I had shot him in the head and the leg. Tall, Medium Size and Long Shirt were all in their late thirties. I had hit Tall three times in the leg and once in the head. Medium Size had bullet wounds in his shoulder, kidney, stomach and knee. I had hit Long Shirt in the head and neck. What remained of Fat Man after two grenades suggested he was the oldest, perhaps fifty, and probably in charge. He had died a captain’s death, going down with his men.

  Medya released me from duty and I walked alone back over the hills, through the boulders and thorn scrub that filled the valleys, until I arrived back at the village where I had left the pick-up. I packed up my gear and we drove the five hours back to the eastern front. The sky was brightening and through the morning fog I could see Sarrin in the distance. In the still of the dawn, with the battle ebbing in my veins, there was a tranquillity to the way these southern flatlands rolled gently down to the Euphrates. The houses were modest and purposeful: plain stone walls, a roof, windows and small wire chicken pens to the side. As the car descended into the valleys, kicking up pale dust as soft as flour, I have a memory of small clutches of pink and blue daisies appearing on either side of us.

  In our movement, we trust each other to do the right thing. I knew it was my duty to fight on. I also knew my experience was needed. Over the last year, fighting had become so easy for me. All that time, I had kept just two questions in my mind. How are we going to attack them? And: how are they going to attack us? I squeezed all my past, present and future into answering them. Night after night, day after day, month after month, I had lain behind my rifle. Through scorching summers, chilling autumns, endless winters and wet, numbing springs, I had kept the enemy in my crosshairs. I had burned my eyes with looking. I had survived other snipers, gun attacks, suicide bombers, tanks, mortars, rocket grenades, booby-traps, trip-wires, stray air strikes, artillery strikes, heavy machine guns and remote-control mines. On a diet of scavenged cheese, jam, the occasional yoghurt and biscuits, I had wasted away to the weight of a thirteen-year-old boy. Without sleep, I lurked in the abyss between adrenalin and exhaustion. So many of my friends had died that I had acquired a new, unwanted duty: to survive in order to keep their memories alive. Observing, waiting, shooting – I packed all of life into that tight existence. If you had seen me back then, carrying my trigger finger through the sharp edges of war as though it were a baby, you would have understood that human beings can survive almost anything if they have purpose.

  But lately I had begun to think that I had nothing left. I felt as though I had used up thirty or forty years of life in months. I was losing the ability to feel the passing of days. One misjudgement, one push too far, and the lone candle that remained in my soul would blow out and the darkness would eat me. Climbing up to the ISIS base outside Sarrin, I had felt myself falling asleep on my feet. The mud had sucked at me, drawing me into the earth’s infinite embrace. Twice my team had called over to me as I drifted off to the side. At one point, Xabat had challenged me with his gun raised, suspicious of this wandering figure way off among the stones.

  I had been back in my old position on the eastern front for a few days when General Tolin came to visit. ‘It’s good that you are here,’ she told me. ‘We need you here. How are you doing?’

  ‘Coping,’ I said.

  Tolin nodded and sucked at her teeth. She looked off to the horizon. After a while, she said, ‘Coping’s not enough, Azad.’

  I tried to reassure her. ‘I can stay here,’ I said. ‘Here is OK for me.’

  Tolin regarded me for a moment. She had made up her mind.

  ‘You go back to Kobani,’ she said. ‘I will see you there.’

  And like that my war was over.

  TWO

  Kobani,

  December 2013 to April 2015

  When the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) advanced into Kurdistan in December 2013, they might have expected to overrun us in days. Formed seven years earlier by a handful of inmates inside the crucibles of torture and humiliation that were the American prisoner-of-war camps in Iraq, ISIS was an evolution from al-Qaeda, established as an alternative for those who found Osama bin Laden’s original group too tame.

  The world hardly welcomed this new model of jihadi. But its retreat before ISIS suggested it largely accepted the Islamists’ central contention: that no force on earth could match their vengeful, suicidal pathology. By the time ISIS invaded northern Syria, they were an army of tens of thousands on an unstoppable march across Iraq, Libya and Yemen, advancing in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and mushrooming in the Philippines, Algeria, Mali, Nigeria and Somalia. Even in places where the group had minimal presence, governments were spending billions trying to prevent attacks by its disciples, all the while resigning themselves to picking up the bodies after their failure.

  For ISIS was no billionaire’s plaything, no bomb-and-hide operation run from a walled villa by a man who couldn’t find the safety on a Kalashnikov. It was a sophisticated, proficient and well-resourced army. It borrowed skills, personnel and materiel from Saddam Hussein’s old regime. It bankrolled itself to the tune of several billion dollars through taxes, donations, confiscations of businesses and the sale of pillaged oil and artefacts. It used its wealth to build a military stronger than many national armies, equipped with artillery, mortars, tanks and heavy machine guns, mobile battle kitchens and surgeries, even social media managers and investment specialists. And rather than al-Qaeda’s few hundred members, ISIS was reinforced by thousands of foreign volunteers who flocked to it from Marseilles to Melbourne.


  Of all the obstacles that stood in the jihadis’ way, the tiny enclave that we had built around Kobani from the wreckage of the Syrian civil war was perhaps the least significant. Kobani was a small town of forty thousand people that you could cross on foot in thirty minutes. The area around it, which we called Rojava, was a thin, five-hundred-kilometre-long strip of bare-walled towns and mudbrick goat and wheat farms sitting below the border with Turkey. When civil war engulfed Syria in 2011, it was here that the Kurds had first risen up. In July 2012, after the forces of Bashar al-Assad withdrew, it was here that they declared the creation of Rojava, an autonomous and democratic province of Syria. Yet while we had our own frontiers and civil administrators, our defences were all but non-existent. We possessed just a few thousand young men and women volunteers. We had almost no money and lacked the most basic equipment, right down to binoculars and radios. What guns we had were generally older than we were.

  But in Kobani, between September 2014 and January 2015, around two thousand of our men and women stopped ISIS’ twelve thousand. Six months later, we pushed all the jihadis out of Rojava. Our defeat of ISIS set in motion their collapse. By early 2017, the jihadis’ dream of a new caliphate had been squeezed to a few pinheads on a map and almost all of ISIS’ foreign volunteers were either dead or fleeing the Middle East in their thousands.

  How did we do it? When you hear that Nasrin shot two hundred jihadis, I shot two hundred and fifty, Hayri three hundred and fifty, and Yildiz and Herdem five hundred each – meaning the five of us took down a sixth of the army ISIS sent against us – you might think you have your answer. But, in truth, that was just one part of it.

  The town where we made our stand, Kobani, wasn’t much to look at. A collection of bare-brick houses clustered around a few dusty bazaars, it sat in a shallow valley surrounded by fields of dry, grey soil and pebbly semi-desert. In the late nineteenth century, Kobani had been a stop on the railway between Berlin and Baghdad. After the Allies redrew the map of the Middle East in 1916, the track was replaced with guard posts, fences and minefields – and what had once been a link between nations became an instrument of division. In the twentieth century, Kobani had eked out an existence as a small border town on the trade route between Arabia and Europe. Few of its people became rich, but no one starved, and most lived their whole lives there, learning in its schools, shopping in its markets and celebrating the spring festival, Newroz, in its squares.

  Kobani’s real significance was in its history. At its centre, archaeologists had found evidence of a dried-up oasis that once served herders moving their flocks between the Euphrates and the Tigris. Among them, supposedly, was Abraham, his wife Sarah and their son Isaac, who had lived for many years at Haran, a day’s walk to the east, around 2,000 BCE. The archaeologists’ digs showed that long before even that time, Kobani had been at the centre of the vast prairie of Mesopotamia. There, around thirteen thousand years ago, our ancestors had been among the first people on earth to give up wandering the land for food and, by domesticating sheep and goats and sowing wheat and barley, invent farming. Around Kobani, they established a homeland of grass-roof villages, and a mythology based around Nature and fertility. Historians called the area the Fertile Crescent. The Torah, the Bible and the Koran called it Eden.

  In the year I spent in Kobani after General Tolin sent me back from the front, I came to realise that these terms were less descriptions of the land than a tribute to the people who had conjured forth a verdant paradise from the desert. The way Kobani sprang back to life after the war was astonishing. Each morning, the vegetable and fruit growers in the bazaars would construct displays so over-abundant as to suggest a lingering anxiety over whether this new-fangled idea called cultivation was going to work. Stalls would be piled high with lemons, prickly pears, pomegranates, black grapes and oranges, while small rockfalls of watermelons sat to the side. The next row would be a mosaic of turnips, potatoes, beetroots, carrots and white-and-fuchsia radishes. In another alley were the market’s true giants: tomatoes the size of small pumpkins, and cucumbers, red and green peppers and shiny black aubergines the length of my forearm. These would be penned in by walls of lettuces, cabbages and cauliflowers and armfuls of coriander, spinach, mint, dill, rosemary and parsley. Yet another alley would be lined with buckets of green and black olives stuffed with chillies and garlic, great sacks of peanuts, walnuts, pistachios and hazelnuts, and spice stalls heaped with miniature hills of dried chilli, scarlet paprika and golden turmeric.

  As I wandered the markets, I inhaled the smell of sweet black tea, cigarette smoke, lamb stuffed with apricots and, my favourite, grouse roasted with honey and cinnamon. In the end, I came to see Kobani as a gigantic village. My alarm each morning was the sound of a cockerel. My view was a row of houses made of home-sawn wood and corrugated iron. Every backyard seemed to contain a cow or a goat.

  When I think of how we withstood the Islamists, I think of Kobani’s stubborn farmers. What anchored us all, fighters and farmers, was a connection to our land. With careful shepherding and untiring care, we had nurtured a rich and varied life from this meagre earth. The diversity was reflected in the city’s population, a mongrel mix of Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians and Arabs, and a large population of Christians living alongside Sunni, Shia and Sufi Muslims, small communities of Sephardi and Musta’arabi Jews and even Zoroastrians.

  Such a mosaic of humanity had often proved to be a recipe for division and conflict in the Middle East. Our intention, guided by the writings of our leader Abdullah Öcalan (also known as Apo), was to embrace it. By celebrating difference, and using tolerance to create community, we would break the cycle of tribe against tribe, and tyrant succeeding tyrant, and all the centuries of bloody murder and revenge that had scarred the region. Our plan was for an egalitarian, democratic society built on respect for all races, religions, communities, genders and nature. We rejected the patronising platitude, so common among Western commentators, that democracy and peace were alien to our land. We rejected, too, the notion that all freedom fighters were doomed to follow the same sorry path of liberating their people, only to turn around and oppress them. And our ambition extended far beyond Rojava or Syria. The reason the Middle East was beset by continual war and crisis, we argued, was because it lacked an example of a peaceful, stable, free and fair society. Rojava was to be that beacon. Once we had planted the seed of liberty in every man and woman, our hope was that they would scatter it across the region and the world, just as they had sown the first grain in the first fields all those millennia ago.

  To foreign observers used to labelling Middle Eastern movements with terms like ‘religious’, ‘ethnic’, ‘socialist’ or ‘nationalist’, we were, I think, a puzzle. Dogmatically broad-minded. Inflexibly anti-sectarian. Freedom fighters who eschewed power. Most confusingly, Middle Eastern and feminist. At the core of our philosophy was the conviction that all tribalism, injustice and inequality stemmed from an original act of oppression when man, the hunter-gatherer, abused his brute strength to violently subjugate his equal partner, woman. In a region where women had been enslaved by governments, culture and religion since time immemorial, in Rojava they were to be equal partners with men in marriage, faith, politics, law, business, the arts and the military. Some outside observers drew parallels to the Spanish revolution of the 1930s, which also united anarchists, communists, republicans and a vanguard of mujeres libres against fascism. We understood the comparison was intended as a compliment. But to us it underestimated what we were attempting: to end prejudice, free the downtrodden and allow the Middle East to escape the carnage that had gripped it for so long.

  This was one reason why Kobani was about more than the achievements of a small band of snipers. Another reason was the courage and sacrifice of two thousand other men and women who fought there, many of whom I never met. All of them have their own tale of heroism. The stories of Herdem, Hayri, Yildiz, Nasrin and me are merely five in a library. To think of our use of sniping as some kind of brill
iant tactic, or even a choice, would be misguided. If all you have is forty-year-old Kalashnikovs, a handful of hunting rifles and handmade grenades, your only option is to kill your enemy one by one.

  But if you had seen me back then, lying out alone in the freezing ruins of Kobani, starved half to death, waiting days to take a single shot at a single man in an advancing army, I think you would have understood. This was about freedom and never giving up. The jihadis talked about commitment but their resolve was the swarm of the mob, a great wave smashing anything in its path. Ours was the grit of the barnacle, the wit and dexterity of David against Goliath. A good sniper understands craft and patience but great ones are masters of destinies, both their own and those of every person on the battlefield. Alone, you watch, decide and act. Alone, you end the other man. There are few purer expressions of free will in this world.

  This unbreakable bond with liberty reflected the principles for which we fought and for which we were prepared to die. It also gave us a mental agility that was key to outwitting the automatons of ISIS. Rather than rely on some external code to guide our behaviour, we trusted in personal responsibility and self-discipline. Inside our military wings, there were no ranks, only operational leaders, and no orders, only suggestions. Nor did we see war as about heroes or glory or purifying fire, or even winning or losing, as ISIS did. War is the darkness in humankind’s nature and the profanity in our imagination. It is a violation and an abomination. Only the malevolent or deranged would seek a war.

  But with ISIS, malevolent and deranged were often what we faced. In many ways, the jihadis denoted the darkness in humanity. If we believed in human possibility, they took a more pessimistic view, regarding people as inherently corrupt and man-made progress as conceptually impossible. And since they reckoned that people couldn’t be trusted to run their own affairs, ISIS had taken it upon themselves to keep them in line using the only language that sinners understood: repression. The jihadis imagined the otherworldly holiness of their cause excused them of any earthly morality. Democracy, equality, rights, tolerance, feminism, freedom – these were the pretty words Satan used to spread his corruption. The way to free people was, paradoxically, to make them servants to Allah and Islam. Likewise, if the first Muslims had been pure and the fourteen centuries since had been a corrosion, then the answer to humankind’s arrogant, sinful advancement was a corrective, cleansing reverse.