Long Shot Page 3

  These, then, were the stakes of our fight. Progress or regression. Light or dark. Life or death. Perhaps it was the way we held up a mirror to their craziness that persuaded the jihadis they had to crush us. For our part, though we would have settled for ISIS’ withdrawal, we understood that there could be no accommodation with men who had given such free rein to their inner beasts.

  And in Kobani, as perhaps nowhere else, we had a slim chance to stop them. ISIS had captured hundreds of towns, some of them with only a handful of men. That it had sent twelve thousand to attack this one town, and that we had deployed hundreds of men and women to defend it, reflected Kobani’s strategic importance. If ISIS captured it, they would cut Rojava in two and take over a ninety-kilometre stretch of the Turkish border over which thousands more foreign jihadis could cross. They would also crush our dream of building a new democratic and free society in the Middle East.

  But by committing so many men to Kobani, the jihadis unwittingly gave us an opportunity to defeat them. And as Vasily Zaytsev had shown in Stalingrad in 1942, when the enemy enters the city, a single unblinking sharp-shooter can keep an entire army in the dirt and change the course of a war. In Kobani there were five of us who could hit a man from a mile away. It was a moment that would never be repeated. In the months after Kobani, Hayri was killed, then Herdem, and as I write now it has been years since I have seen Yildiz and Nasrin. I alone am here to tell the story of how we stood our ground, took back our homeland street by street and house by house and, man by man, shot the jihadis to pieces.

  THREE

  Kobani,

  September–October 2014

  I first saw Kobani on an evening in September 2014. The sun was setting, the first hints of an autumn chill were stealing into the air and before me, about a mile away, ISIS was laying siege to the town with columns of fighters in pickup trucks, supported by heavy machine guns and tanks.

  In the previous few days, ISIS had taken the three hundred and fifty villages that surrounded the town and advanced deep into its streets. Hundreds of our men and women were already dead. Some had made extraordinary sacrifices. One team commander called Cudi, facing a mass of advancing jihadis on a position called Sûsan Hill outside the city, had refused his general’s suggestion to pull back. ‘I can see the houses of Kobani from here,’ he said over the radio. ‘How can I leave? Their tanks will have to go over my body.’ Minutes later, his commanders observed that, after wounding him, the jihadis did exactly as Cudi had predicted.

  Arin Mikan, a platoon commander from the YPJ, the women’s militia, made another extraordinary last stand. As ISIS advanced to her position on Mistenur Hill, the gateway to Kobani, Arin told the women of her platoon to pull back. Then she strapped as many grenades and explosives as she could to her body, tied them to a single trigger and ran down the hill towards the jihadis. The Islamists tried to shoot her. Despite being hit several times, she kept running, crashed through their lines and pulled the detonator. Arin took ten jihadis with her when she died.

  But ISIS had pressed on. Within days, they had pushed our surviving volunteers into a thin crescent of territory along the Turkish frontier that ran for several kilometres but was only about a dozen blocks from north to south at its widest point. Encircled as our forces were, the only way to join them was from Turkey. I followed the road to the border, eventually reaching an abandoned Syrian immigration checkpoint that consisted of a guardhouse and a pair of bruised and bullet-scarred gates, seemingly bent back by the maelstrom beyond. Squeezing between them and stepping out into the dusk, I found myself slipping and rolling on a carpet of bullet casings and unexploded mortars. I also came immediately under fire. I stumbled for cover and ran into the debris of collapsed walls, flattened houses and three-storey buildings that had vomited their insides into the street. Everywhere there was broken glass, splintered doors, burned earth, torched cars and soiled clothes. It was like a dark mirror of existence. The accessories of living were all around, yet life itself was absent. I stumbled on until I found my way to a basement in which a small group of our fighters were sheltering.

  Kobani, I knew, was built on one of the oldest settlements on earth. It was astonishing how one week of war had erased so much history. Some of that was our doing. Talking to my comrades, I learned that since enemy snipers now had our entire territory within range, moving in the streets had become impossible. Instead our men and women were busy smashing through the walls of houses and shops and ancient bazaars to create a network of hidden, covered passageways. They were living and fighting in these tunnels, scurrying from a kitchen stacked with crockery and pots of rotting rice through a hole in a wall into a garden, then ducking back into the living room of a neighbouring house where a sofa might still sit in front of the television, a small bowl of dusty, shrivelled grapes to the side.

  I became used to so much in the five months we fought in Kobani but I don’t think I ever made peace with the way we robbed and vandalised these homes. We paved our passageways with prized carpets and precious mattresses so we could run without tripping over concrete and debris. Anything red we laid on top to conceal the blood that spilled from our wounded as they were dragged back from the front. I would desecrate children’s brightly coloured bedrooms by smashing holes in their walls to make an aperture through which to fire. I would demolish kitchens, tables and wardrobes to find flat pieces of wood or marble on which I could lie behind my gun.

  As I found my way through my new surroundings, I realised the war was suffocating all the colour in Kobani. Our green uniforms were covered in dirt. ISIS dressed in black. Everything else – the shops, the cars, the trees, the photographs of children on the walls, the tablecloths and bedspreads, the skirts and shirts on the washing lines – was being subsumed under a blanket of sticky yellow filth. With little to guide me through this monochrome wasteland, I found my way by smell as much as sight. The dull stink of unwashed bodies meant I was near the frontline. The sharp reek of bloating corpses told me that I was on it.

  The only calm was what you could create in your mind. At night, I would lie out on the rooftops, listening to the flapping of the giant curtains that our volunteers stitched together out of sheets and prized rugs raided from closets and sitting rooms and hung across the streets to block ISIS’ line of sight. The sound was like patchwork sails in a storm, and as I lay there, I would imagine I was a sailor out on deck, adrift on an ocean far away.

  We all knew Kobani would be bloody. The jihadis had set the tone of the war from its first days in January 2014. They advanced by blitzkrieg, arriving in an overwhelming horde, subjecting us to an onslaught of artillery, tanks and mortars, then moving into the ruins to mop up survivors. In one early battle in eastern Rojava, in a place called Tel Hamees, ISIS pretended they were retreating to lure two hundred and fifty of our men and women into an open field that they had surrounded, then opened fire, tossed in hand grenades and finally waded through the bodies with swords, decapitating at will. Days later, when my comrades pushed ISIS out again, they found their friends’ heads stacked up in piles like pomegranates on a street stall.

  By the summer we had learned that such battlefield massacres were often just the start of ISIS’ atrocities. Even against the dark record of fellow Islamists around the world, the jihadis distinguished themselves with their depravity and childlike simplicity. Here were grown men who roasted prisoners over fires and sold sex slaves with notes of provenance tied around their necks while carrying spoons into battle because of a fairytale they had been told about the feasts with the Prophet that awaited them in paradise. Their fighters made videos showing themselves executing hundreds of prisoners at a time by herding them into pits and opening fire. They filmed themselves beheading journalists, crucifying prisoners and throwing homosexuals from rooftops. They executed moderate imams and Christians for ‘sorcery’. They sawed the heads off grandfathers just for daring to stay put in their homes when they invaded. They left hundreds of corpses piled high in central squares or ha
nging from lamp-posts. They paraded whole families through the streets, then gathered crowds to watch as they shot fathers in front of sons, sons in front of mothers, mothers in front of daughters and daughters in front of the bloody heap that had once been their families – and all this they broadcast on giant outdoor screens. They liked to say they would behead their enemies so swiftly that the first they would know of it was when their heads were on the ground and their eyes were looking back at their own feet.

  That summer of 2014, the jihadis had attempted to escalate their butchery into a genocide. The Yazidis were Kurds, though with their own distinct origin, religion and culture, whose ancestral land in Iraq was just across the border from where I was initially stationed in eastern Rojava. From my sniper’s nest in the town of Al-Yarubiyah, I could see across the frontier to the great edifice of Mount Shengal (Sinjiar in Arabic), to where the Yazidis had always retreated in times of trouble and where jihadis had surrounded tens or even hundreds of thousands of them with the intent of exterminating them.

  Yazidis fleeing into our territory told us that ISIS had signalled the start of the massacre by issuing proclamations declaring them to be godless half-humans, a pollution on God’s earth and undeserving of life. That was a cue for the jihadis to wipe out whole families and entire villages in an onslaught of blood and fire. If they took prisoners, it was only to extend their suffering. They demanded the men convert. If their captives refused, or sometimes even if they obeyed, they beheaded them or lined them up and shot them en masse. In one massacre, the jihadis led a group of elderly men into an ancient Yazidi temple, only to blow it up with the old men inside. Just having hair under their arms was enough to condemn Yazidi boys to the same fate. The jihadis seemed to take particular pride in the ingenuity of their cruelty. Some men they led in chains to roundabouts, tied them to a stake and left them in the heat so they died of thirst in view of passing traffic. Others they herded into steel cages where they were burned alive or left to starve, or lowered into rivers to drown.

  Some of the women were spared. A few were put to work as cleaners. But mainly these men of God took the women and girls as objects to be raped and passed around fighters. Gang-rape was routine. After the fighters were done, they would execute the women for licentiousness or sell them in the market as sex slaves. A few virgins were reserved for ISIS’ business managers, who would sell them to rich Arabs for up to ten thousand dollars each.

  Lest anyone imagine they were barbarians, ISIS had regulations for their trade in sex slaves. Some Yazidis brought us copies of an ISIS pamphlet entitled ‘Questions and Answers On Taking Captives and Slaves’. It was permissible to have sex with a pre-pubescent girl, ISIS’ leaders decreed, ‘if she is fit for intercourse’. It was also legal to ‘buy, sell or give’ Yazidi females since, as unbelievers and sub-humans, ‘they are merely property, which can be disposed of’. This also seemed to apply to the children that inevitably resulted from the jihadis’ industrial-scale raping. These were taken away from their mothers as infants to be trained as Kurdish-looking suicide bombers who could infiltrate their own people.

  One problem the jihadis encountered was that there were simply too many Yazidi women and girls for them to be able to rape or sell them all. The jihadis solved this conundrum by liquidating the excess. In the late summer of 2014 we heard about one massacre when ISIS, with an apparent eye on conserving labour and ammunition, buried alive hundreds of mothers with their children.

  If there was a strategy behind this savagery, it was to persuade their enemies to flee. We did not. When ISIS advanced on Shengal, twelve of our volunteers set up on its summit and kept thousands of ISIS fighters at bay for days before they succumbed, allowing many hundreds of Yazidi families to escape. In the end, a total of five hundred thousand Yazidis fled to our territory or to Turkey. Still, the death and destruction were grotesque. ISIS killed around five thousand Yazidi men and abducted seven thousand women and children, most of whom remain missing to this day. Hundreds of Yazidi children died of thirst and starvation as they fled.

  The Yazidis told us that scores of their women and girls had leapt to their death from the cliffs of Mount Shengal rather than let themselves be captured. As the jihadis switched the full force of their fury to us across the border in Syria, we soon had similar stories of our own. Arriving one afternoon in August 2014 in the town of Jazaa, not far from the Iraqi border, I found everyone talking about how three weeks before, when Jazaa had fallen to ISIS for the second time before being recaptured once again, a group of twelve young YPJ women defending a position on the rooftop of a two-storey building had fought to the end rather than let themselves be taken prisoner. When it became clear they were surrounded, they had gathered in a circle and pulled the pins on the grenades that each had kept for the purpose.

  The story stunned me. Like many comrades, I carried three bullets in my breast pocket, one for each calibre of rifle, so that I would always be able to take my own life rather than be taken prisoner. We called these rounds our ‘saviour bullets’. They gave us a sense of indomitable will. We alone would decide how we lived and how we died. I had already come across the bodies of comrades who had used their saviour bullets. One man was sitting down, his finger still on the trigger. One woman had tied her hand to her rifle. But saviour bullets were neat and precise and left a body for comrades to bury and a grave for relatives to visit. Grenades disintegrated you. It would be like you never existed.

  I walked into the ground floor of the building where the women had died to find piles of clothes – soft fabrics in cheerful pinks, purples and greens – drenched in blood on the floor. There was a guard on duty. He told me the women had died on the second-floor roof terrace. I would have to go up there alone. ‘I can’t look at that again,’ he said.

  I climbed the stairs. The entire terrace was covered in a thick film of blood, some dry, some still wet, like the floor of an abattoir. All around were pieces of flesh and clumps of hair. There was a black ponytail, its tie still around it. On the walls was more hair, and on the parapet a few scattered wisps trembling in the wind. These young women would have known their fate if they were captured by ISIS. The story went that they decided they couldn’t allow the jihadis to use their bodies in any way, not even allowing them the fleeting pleasure of a glimpse of their beauty.

  I was still on the roof, trying to digest the power of what I was seeing, when General Qahraman, commander of our eastern front, climbed up and gingerly moved to a corner to get a signal on his phone. All week Qahraman had been calling Kobani. That day, as Qahraman listened to the voice on his phone, his shoulders slumped. When he hung up, he said the latest information was that our forces were down to their last few hundred yards and ISIS was hours from capturing Kobani.

  I looked around the rooftop. It wasn’t that anyone wanted to die. But war had been thrust upon us and suicidal defiance often seemed the only response we had. We all knew we would face injury, horror and death – and we set our minds to sharing these things with our comrades. Using a Kurdish saying, we said we embraced the moment with ‘wild flowers and mint’.

  I also knew I would be useful in Kobani. In eight months, I had shot around fifty ISIS fighters: fifteen kills I had confirmed with my own eyes and around thirty-five probables. I hated the body counts. Only a weak man would measure himself in kills and only a fool would try to describe all the hate, loss, sacrifice and love in war with a number. But like the women of Jazaa, I knew there were times when extreme actions were necessary. I told Qahraman I would go to Kobani to assist the resistance.

  He nodded. ‘Try not to get killed in the first three days,’ he said.

  As I made my home in the ruins of Kobani, I was happy to come across a familiar face. But whereas General Tolin had been warm and positive when I first met her months earlier in eastern Rojava, now, at a briefing for new arrivals, her face was tight and focused. She went around our small group, asking each man and woman their names and skills. Then she summarised the situation.
There were three fronts – east, south and west. All of them were backed up against the Turkish border to the north and barely three hundred metres at their widest. ‘We have run out of space to retreat,’ she said. ‘Our frontline is now a line of honour. We hold it or we die fighting. This will be our legacy to our fellow Kurds.’

  Tolin said each front was defended by around one hundred and fifty men and women, broken down into three platoons of fifty, each of those made up of four or five squads or teams. Ideally, each team would have a heavy machine gun, an RPG, a medic and a sniper as well as four or five fighters with Kalashnikovs. But after so many casualties, most were several bodies short, with barely enough guns to go around. Tolin assigned the new volunteers to fill the gaps as best she could. When she came to me, she asked me to stay behind.

  After the others had left, Tolin said she was dispatching a special operation of seventy men and women to cross secretly over our front and into enemy territory. There, in the villages and fields deep behind their lines, we were to run sabotage operations to create confusion and paranoia among the jihadis by showing we could live fearlessly among them, killing them at will. Though Tolin didn’t say it, we both knew it was potentially a suicide mission. If ISIS found or captured us – if any of us made one small noise or movement at the wrong moment – it would be over for all of us.