The Brooklyn labor ghetto at night smells like rum smoked chicken, like muscle cars and also like marijuana and or just a rotting refuse; the aura blown up into the heavens by the heating exhaust steams.
ADONAEV
On my 32nd birthday, everyone assumes I will soon die in the Syrian Civil War. So, my birthday is actually very well attended and unfolds with lots of cocaine, alcohol, and dancing over four venues well into the next day’s dawn. Everyone toasts to everything! Often to me! Often to whatever they warble! I wake up with Martina in Harlem.
It was by far the single largest birthday I have ever had and seems as though I had many friends and allies. But a year later, if I survived the war, none of these people would care or be around when needed. They had lives occupied with varying struggles that left no room for human solidarity. These friends are always there to drink my food and eat my wine, to hear about adventures but not really ever get involved for the most part. Having no real culture of my own, at some point I adopted elements of Trinidadian and Russian cultures, both which place tremendous value and veneration on the birthday ritual. I would even go so far to say that West Indians and Post Soviets treat the birthday as a sort of celebratory holiday, trumped only by weddings, funerals and for Trinidadian Carnivals. I had this feeling on my 33rd birthday, that very few people knew or cared if I was alive inside. Did not know how to react to my intention to head off to Syria. I had the feeling for my family any day in January could do, and that preparing a meal like any other meal, with a cake, was adequate. Now, were I a homeless drug addict, or a person of exceptionally low social and moral character, perhaps I should feel tremendous gratitude that I have a family, that I am being given some food and also a cake. I am a very ungrateful wretched person. However, my birthday is on the 30th not the 23rd, and to me it is offensive and borderline insulting that my family would sort of ambush me with a birthday eight days early largely based on my brother’s flight plans. Because that is exactly what happened, it was a Potemkin birthday for the sake of my brother who I had not seen in 2 years. As for most others, without social media I’m sure few really knew when it was. And so with the world’s smallest violin in my hand I undertook to spend it completely alone, or partially alone since both Alan and Martina had discovered it and in their own ways cultures and obligations understood the importance of a birthday ritual. Without any real plan the guest list ballooned to over fifty people. None of which approved of my upcoming travel plans. Martina was the first person to ever publish my writing, while perhaps a poem or short story or two had appeared in varying poorly circulated underground presses, this was not any more auspicious, but I was certainly more widely read. Martina is a Bulgarian journalist and real estate agent now. I see her once a year. There was nothing going on here except sympathy. Just before I drove back to my Brooklyn safe house at 5 am dawn, I was doing some coke off her inner leg.
Sometimes late at night from a safe house in the borough of Brooklyn Sebastian Adonaev will read from one of his manuscripts and post it to the internet, for whoever might be listening. Really no one was listening, maybe Polina, depending on what time of night. These were futile, desperate calls for attention. For validation. For reaction. Since, in the United States the cause of anti-capitalism was for the most part soundly defeated many decades in the past. The man had some relative sympathy, but not exactly a sympathizer base which he might have cultivated more effectively over the years. Which might have resulted in a short little burst of terrorism, truncated of course by the all-pervasive American security state. What held him back were all the repeated hospitalizations, which came nearly every year. Invalidating his mind and probably also his message. This never seemed to deviate from a meme of communism and human rights, but by the age of 33, he had only a few people willing to listen to even just 1 minute of his message. His few friends left take him in small smei-annual doses.
Sebastian Adonaev reads:
“Sometimes, old friend, I cry from my own weakness.” I bash my Jew face against various mirrors around town angered by my own lack of force, lack of seed, and lack of ability to carry my band more truly into glorious and successful battle. I beat my frail fists on concrete walls which always win! I ask my God why it entrusted me with anything at all. For I am so small and so unable it seems to be a good fighter, an adequate lover, or a good leader, or a good son, or a good husband to Adelina, a good much of anything. I started the game with such a strong position but have not leveraged that to advance my people and cause, even protect those I loved the most!
Then I remember my actual role, not the role my mad ego ascribes. I am but one single partial partisan. One isolated man with such true friends.
I am commanding, a funny word “commanding”, more appropriate term coordinating for can one even give orders to a volunteer? A force that numbers at any given time no more than ten to maybe twenty women and men. And no God nor man nor foreign government gave us marching orders; well at times a Russian woman gave me some directions, but only when at most desperate and bleak junctures, I had no counsel to turn to. But I brought almost all this chaos upon my house unaided! But this is hardly a wide conspiracy. But looking into my own soul I am not doing this for God or man, I am not simply avenging my losses, nor am I simply working off a duty to act. No, no; I am self-propelled and highly lucky. I am doing this because my eyes see fire. I am doing this because I have seen the view from the top of the Mountain, I have seen the killing fields too.
“I have a great empathy with my kind. I wish good to triumph over callous and well-planned evil!”
And the responsibilities that impressed me by the old leadership, they were small bits. And I say to myself that if our little band with no weapons and no training and no funding and the protection provided us only by our passports and various skin tones could do so much! Still, we did accomplish a range of small things in the Americas and beyond. We took over buildings, organized demonstrations, built unions, and operated a substantial underground press. If we could build youth brigades and lay cells across four continents; if we could operate clandestine supply chains, raise tens of thousands in equipment and supplies, conduct hundreds of underground political trainings, infiltrate major city civil service organizations, if we could smuggle activists and trainers into distant countries uninvited and opposed by the government. If we could do all of this with no outside support and do it with keeping all our partisans out of long-term prison and have only buried three men in seventeen years of war under questionable circumstances. Well perhaps we are all still young and the war shows no sign of being over. Perhaps we have a small latent talent for freedom fighting and if not killed or imprisoned could with a little guidance grow more professional.
And we have not killed one single person in seventeen years, in fact we have with our own hands saved the lives of thousands and counting.
“I’ve always said he has a fucking ton of potential! For good, for self or for evil, wherever his own heart sends him,” Goldy once declared.
So, really as was explained to me then in 2012 before the uprising in Brooklyn by my confidant Goldy Andreavna; I could either surrender, collaborate or be utterly destroyed. But as she gauged my nature was highly American, she guessed correctly I would never tolerate a life of collaboration, so thus death or some impossible victory were the only moves coming.
“I have been imprisoned twenty times.” My brothers and sisters have never allowed them to take me for long. Each time they have chained me to beds, administered electricity, loaded me with drugs, asked millions of stupid questions to attempt to make me alter my perspective, denounce my own logic. I have observed members of the band lose their very homes and their livelihoods and their freedom and their health. I have seen men thrown through Plexiglas glass windows. We have been held in cages and tortured. The deaths of Mcgaffey, Becker and Black were all sudden, violent, and unexplained. I remember little Paul behind bars, I remember harassment and humiliation of Comrade Vik, I remember how much was sacrificed vainly in the name of this struggle. This struggle which absorbs my beingness as though it were the love of a woman, but I am a zealot. I am not good at anything but this. I am in love with my entire people and I have resolved that it would be better to be killed, to lose my privileges of skin and class, than to live in a world where a tiny vile few make the lives of the many, the lives of all I know and love a wretched grinding torture. Truly a half-life.
“I cry sometimes, no longer in the presence of any others.” Goldy mocked me so each time I failed to be a man. I cry because the horror is so vast and the injustice so great. And I have but ten to twenty partisans, several with wives and children. I worry that I am not going to be able to shoulder this struggle, that I lead my closest to sedition and doom. I worry I do not have the moral fortitude, the calm patience of humble leadership, the organizational skills, the funds we will need, the weapons, the uniforms, the petrol, the Planes, the will. For I am a man, and I am seduced sometimes by wanting a good life, wanting to walk away. This is not your fight, she said, “no one asked you to struggle!”!
“Friends, they torture me once a year.” They tell me I have an unstable mind. They drag me away repeatedly. I am grateful for such friends as you, who refuse to accept surrender. Who knows that we can win the war! I wanted to tell you all, see what we do with just ten women and men. You have that many fighters too. Here we all are at the top of the mountain, assembled in the ghettos encircling the Isle of Man.
“I loved her so much. Maybe only one or two of you know what I am talking about. They took from me the only thing a man should care about.”
“I’m thankful for the resistance.” I am thankful for our little Otriad in Brooklyn. For the cells in Chicago, Philly, Baltimore, and DC. The underground in Moldova, Cambodia, Haiti and occupied Israel. I am grateful to Commander Saint Reed in Mosul, and Commander Bonhomie in Port Au Prince. Inspired deeply by the teachings of Solomon and DeBuitléirs. I love my family and my wife; I hope this is the year we go pro. She is a million miles away, but she can hear me. She can see me. She liked me better before I found Communism, liked me better before I rediscovered my religion. She even liked my used suits better than the battered blue uniform I wear now.
I raise glass to the East, for somewhere out there I hope she is waiting for me, waiting for us to win. I raise my glass, I look my men and women in the eyes when I toast, Long live the resistance, God protect the bloodline of the prophets and the Meshiaak84and the Mahdi. God keeps us moving along the straight path, not the path of those who are cowards, or those who have been lost and led astray.”
For those of you who are joining us from home, for those listening from the trenches, from the fields or from the big house, or as servants in the towers.
A trucker with a heart of gold clings to his worst memories to not fully lose his mind in pity and drink. He is paid to move some cargo from point A to point B, but it is a lonely and meaningless life. As though he is working to pay for moving himself as meaningless cargo.
HEVAL JILO
“Shipping out from Boston any day now,” I tell myself. I tell myself the pain will be over soon. I tell myself I’m just an ordinary New England Joe. You can call me Micky because it’s my born name.
I have a pretty gruff face. A New England working class disposition. I think it made a lot of the younger volunteers think I had some kind of training I didn’t have. Just a little bit of running and my knees would start to hurt. But they all ask me if I was in the military, even though I never ever was. Very few of the YPG volunteers have any useful training, besides from the leftists. They are self-trained to see things, imagine things that are probably not even there.
On my chest I am wearing a picture of my ex-girlfriend, about the size of a baseball card. That’s perfectly normal, right? But more on that later down the line.
I watched it on the news for several years before the cumulative effect took over me. By the time I was being struck by Turkish air force and artillery vollies, running through trenches and tunnels in Afrin Canton, called by the Hevals as Jilo Boston, well I used to drive a UPS truck. That was all the training for this I had. After that I installed solar panels. I had no other serious qualifications that made me ready for the war. Even a bit of light running makes my knees hurt.
Explains Heval Jilo from Boston: “I mean it’s really Mikey Mike or Michael, but they named me Heval Jilo from Boston.”
Now, strangely it seemed that in the Academy Hevals Zinar and Jansher, the two principal instructors and commanders of Western internationalists ended up sending people with no ideology to occupy Raqqa and those they somewhat ideologically trusted to fight in still raging battles near Deir Ez-Zor. But that wasn’t a hard fast rule.
They liked, but didn’t seem to trust me, well any of us. Some of the leftists like Kawa and Shoresh tried to buddy up to Cancer. Some of the military guys like Heval Ciya tried to buddy up to Zinar, but really, they didn’t seem to have favorites. We all looked good on our martyr posters and in death could bring the Kurdish cause to the front pages of our national papers.
I’m cynical about Zinar and Cancer, they were of course there just to figure out how to use us effectively as so-called ‘revolutionary militants.’ Most of the Academy, which lasted about six weeks, was all rhetoric and talk. I might have fired my AK, maybe 15 rounds worth. I held up well I think given my age! I hadn’t intended to join the Y.P.G. in the beginning, I tried to enlist in Sinjar first with the Y.B.S.83, but they had put a freeze on international volunteers for whatever reason. Eventually the P.K.K. smuggled me, a loud British Gypsy and a French aristocrat lawyer from Makumr Camps into Syria.
Around my neck is a picture of my ex-girlfriend. I’m sure it sends a more portrait of my mental health to the few who see it, but I don’t have to explain shit to anyone. I don’t want to say anymore, so I won’t. My name is to be Jilo Boston, or that’s what they plan to call me in Kurdistan. I enlisted via proton mail in a formation called the Y.B.S. and received permission to make the crossing.
I don’t have any formal military experience, though some people ask me about it, say I have that look. I’ve been watching the Islamic State terrorize the world on TV for about three years. After a while, I just came to accept that I would go be a part of it. Contribute in my little way. As several hundred had done before me and probably will do after.
My last job was to install solar panels on rooftops. My previous job before that was as a UPS truck driver. It is obvious I was lonely and felt that doing something heroic, even if I got killed, was tangible and important. I was supposed to fly to Slemani and then get smuggled over to the Shengal. The YBS were at that time fighting in Raqqa city. I had to close out my life part by part. There was no fear in my body, only excitement. No longer would I be an observer. This was going to be the highest stakes thing I ever did; I could only fantasize that someone would tell the woman on my chest I fell fighting heroically.
I can’t say that was all the motivation or even half. I cared of course that she knew about my contributions, should I end up making them. What did I feel like? Like shit. Like I did not have such an interesting or amazing life and that if I did this with honor, died or not I’d have some kind of redemption. What to say more? I do not know if I am not the one drafting this book. I will just say that I want my ex to be proud of me for what I tried to do, even if it was just to get blown up being somewhere I shouldn’t be in the Middle East. In the desperate trenches of Afrin, he would be known by my Kurdish name Jilo Boston. Man, we barely got out alive. I look back at it sometimes and I get this sad empty feeling like all these fucking people gave their lives for absolutely nothing. Because in the end, we did not really defeat I.S.I.S., we didn’t replace Assad, we did not stabilize Iraq or the oil, we did not curb Türkiye, we did not build so-called democracy, and everyone got killed for almost nothing.
They say the first stage of constructing a believable fictitious identity is to focus on one banal old job, knowing its most minute components inside out. Have one sad story, your sort of guarded reason to be and one good reason to not talk a lot. Primarily, do not tell stories about places you have never been to.
At the “House of Yes” pansexual Cabaret on a New Years Eve there is glitter fucking everywhere.
In an underground afterhours party, there is a young Peruvian girl with great big tits and a tramp stamp dancing on my face. Happy new year to me. Or to somebody with a better-looking life. Sure, better than any house of no! We ended up getting a room at the Standard Hotel. I fuck her as hard as I can for as long as I can, for as long as she will let me.
SEBASITAN ADONAEV
“NEWYORKGRAD- the “city that never sleeps”/ the Big Apple. What a city? What makes it such a hot commodity to be here? It can get as flashy, as artsy, as chic, or as truly ghetto, working-poor miserable as you want, or you let it. You can get anything here, they say. It can all be bought, sold, found, or obtained somewhere in all five boroughs of the ity for a price. And you and your sanity is the motherfucking price.
“IF YOU CAN’T MAKE IT HERE YOU CAN HOPEFULLY MAKE IT SOMEWHERE ELSE!”
“But nothing is ever real, or real enough for someone allegedly from here. It is a gathering point for people who have abandoned their old people. It’s a petting zoo for an Empire filled with hookers and administered by the cream of the Jews.”
Sebastian Adonaev “the paramedic adventurer,” watches over the Brooklyn Ghetto at night. Smoking a Newport from the rooftop. Recording his angry thoughts in a leather-bound journal. As is typical in my own fashion, I worked on a holiday that to me is a pagan aberration. Clearly, 2017 is not the actual year. Not at all. In the “Russian culture” which I have in some form absorbed into my own amalgamated creed, what you do and who you surround yourself on New Years Eve, is a sample of the year to come. This is like many Russian idioms, up “variable interpretation”. Variance in interpretation. The good old “cultural context.” Especially as Old Russian New Year is probably a couple weeks away, still in the future.
ADONAEV
I am playing a civilian and a transport paramedic in the age of near constant war. A serf, just a working class serf with no proerty, in the latest version of New-New-York-Fucking-City. Or NEWYORKGRAD; depends on if you know about “the occupation” or not. It depends on what papers you subscribe to. It depends on what languages you speak and what reality you sign up for.
My comrade Danny Hertz has a crazy looking hippy beard.
He throws me some nightlife work over the years. He offers me $250 for a 10-hour gig at the “House of Yes,” the artsy hipster performing arts multi-space. So, I take it, just like I did in 2016. The shortlist of the New Years variables. I came off from my real ambulance job. I slept 6 hours and had dinner with my aging parents. I took a cab to the House Of Yes. I made some new single-serving work friends. As usual got on well with security and took care of two intoxicated women, both who invited me into the cab I placed them in. Then a guy went briefly unconscious, I induced vomiting and cleaned him up, leaving him with the doctor’s friends. When the ball finally dropped, my two ambulance partners, Alisha and Jose, wished me well. lia the lawyer invited me for coffee in the New Year. Polina Mazaeva left me a voicemail. No one tried to kiss me. But that was way after midnight. And of course, I had a long conversation about not a lot with a gangster from East New York named Cyrus. I ran into my old volunteer and ffriend Jon Denby, who fought with us in Haiti, and eventually, Danny Hetz came at 9am to relieve me, as the party was to carry on until 6pm.
There is this Peruvian Italian chick who keep buying me drinks and making out with me. With enormous breasts, dancing near me, while I made sure the intoxicated people sleeping were dead. And I felt a kind of savage carnal lust, very different from that which I felt in a while. And I saw her look at me a,nd I knew she’d let me draw her something, but I didn’t do or say shit. And not new years or sleep deprivation or run changes all that. And the bartender offered me a drink, but I don’t let batti-man I don’t know give me drinks, no, it didn’t matter he was gay. I just didn’t really need or want a drink. Smoked some cigarettes, ate a complimentary egg and cheese. Texted Polina happy New Years and took the train home not an Uber. Like a worker. Because fundamentally, I have been a hard worker for a while. And fundamentally, I like trains. But not as much as I like to fuck that Italian with big tits like a savage.
I feel like 2016 was a year of incredible unmitigated defeat, near death and only partial recovery. So that would mean 2017 has the potential to be-anything. Since Russian idioms are about mind games and superstition, not about fate or destiny. But no matter how much I would like to say I’ve developed some real self-interest. It may be a year to stack cash and stabilize what’s left of sympathetic base and fee friends. A part of me wants to blow coke off her tits and ravish her in a way that my girlfriend can’t manage. The reality is that I must maintain my honor and my courage, my course. It is my destiny to be a guerrilla, not a reckless debauch. Not a scoundrel. Not a normal serf. I will use my time this year to be healthy enough to resume the fight, when I am ready to sustain it.
***
A few weeks before Sebastian Adonaev left New York for Cuba, then Russia, then Turkey, then Iraq for Rojava he gave a firebrand speech in front of nearly 40,000 people sometime in early April on Time Square at a large liberal solidarity pageant called “TODAY WE ARE ALL MUSLIMS”. His speech was just a 5-minute radical little foot note in an overall group hug of liberalism. Under five minutes in duration, its message to remember how all immigrants were treated when they arrived here was coupled with an extollation for the resistance to defend Muslim lives in America. This ‘resistance’ that the spoke of us was nebulous here in the U.S.A. Mostly it amounted to loud anti-Trump pageants. Freedom of speech is, almost, still without any limits.
He imagined while speaking that his on again off again, sometimes hot mostly cold muse, a debutante of Midtown, Russian courtesan ex-flame Goldy was watching it from the crowd, but that was improbable that she was. The speech called for the defense of Muslims amid the international genocide being perpetrated against them. It called on immigrants and descendants of immigrants to mount collective defense. My family came to watch, it was the very last thing they were ever proud of. Better to say it so others can do it, it seemed to be the family ethic.
His kid cousin Alexis came to watch him speak. She was into it, but also a bit chicken shit and American mentally at the end of the day. Also, something of a hipster. Not a bad kid, just high levels of probably not gonna make it in New York. But maybe she could still make it somewhere else? Eventually later when the art didn’t pay the bills, she turned to sex work.
After a fancy dinner, which was once a week normal for his upper middle class household, lots of bottles of white wine later; perhaps three, still in the dark blue rebel uniform of a G.C.C. a “staff medical officer”, he headed off to the fancy night club Le Bain on the roof of the Standard Hotel with Benny, his younger brother, Benny’s fiancé Nessa-Vanessa and little hipster cousin Alexis. They all rediscover old friend uncle Vodka, they all get fucking lit. In the glamour and chaos of the night, Sebastian Adonaev is to meet his future lawyer. Buxom and brilliant Ms. Chanie Chanel Rossi. His future lawyer.
Remembers Sebastian,
Out of my left eyes I saw an extremely attractive blonde in big glasses looking elegant and upper class but well intentioned. I saw her surrounded by tall dark and handsome men, wondering if she was an escort. Wondered what she charged. You see I’m not about that life because I can’t afford it sure, but not about that life because it’s so fucking degrading to all the women walking it. The woman who introduced herself as Chanel was happy and pleasant and gave me an email address and number to send her some of my work. My paintings.
It was all very businesslike, like a transaction. But she was filled with good happy energy, and I was about to fly off and possibly die for this cause! If necessary. Not ideally. Ideally, I’d come back and get the girl. Like in an American movie.
Remembers Chanel:
I think he wants to put me on my back for a very long time. I think I would be open-minded to it, except that I do truly love my boyfriend Mr. Charlie. So therefore, it actually barely doesn’t cross my mind. Charlie and I are made for each other, which is why I must be so careful with this older man writing to me. But if his cock was between my legs, even if Charlie finds a single letter; then I get off my master plan, which is Harvard and Law and a perfect husband. Charlie is actually nearly perfect, and we’ve been together seven years.
It’s safe to say I find Sebastian Adonaev more than a little attractive. And that has to do with what he is, a paramedic, and what he says he will do which is much more than regular people. Which is to say volunteer in Syria. Sebastian recounts:
If I told you that I was not hoping to have a lot of sex with this buxom stylish young woman, I would be a great big fucking liar. But it was all highly innocent talk. She admired my work and my lifestyle, and I admired her convictions. Her words you could say had pure and undiminished optimism.
Her body, I could spend days on, in one or many settings. But the opportunity would never present itself. In my culture you can marry women half your age plus seven, but it was not about that. She had a man. That never came to be an option for us as lovers, as she was very devoted to her boyfriend Mr. Charlie, a bit of a possessive psychopath if you ask me. He would later find the innocent letters and flip out. I suppose he was right that I would go to bed with his girlfriend, anyone might, if given the opportunity. As the story goes, he just left her in an airport and turned around.
But they were always off and on for as long as she ever wrote to me about magic and positive energy and hopeful living. He got her pregnant and abandoned her. She had an abortion; he took her back. That was her miserable lot, Charlie. But Sebastian neither passed judgement nor respected things without rings on fingers.
I never got the opportunity because of her morals and of course logistics, I met her about two weeks before deployment. She was up in Harvard, and I was down in Brooklyn. But she made quite an impression, he notes:
Let’s talk about Chanel Chantal Rossi, shall we. She’s a blonde bourgeoisie from the Caribbean Island of St. Martin. I met her only briefly, perhaps under a minute in a fancy supper club in the city. It was just long enough for me to take her information and strike up a correspondence based on her hippy views and happy optimism. I made her a rather beautiful sketch; she mailed me a book called ‘Mindfulness on the Go’ and we wrote to each other periodically throughout the war. Actually, she never got any of my letters until about half a year after I returned because the Special Forces were running a really special pony express from the front to her apartment near Harvard in Boston. By that time her boyfriend Charlie had found the letters and didn’t think very well of them at all. Really in the end Ms. Chanie, without engaging in a single infidelity, unleashed an incredible insecurity and rage. But at that stage, there was only light magic and enchanted optimism. She was delighted with the painting. She mailed him some candles and a small book called Mindfulness on the Go.
To Comrade Sebastian Adonaev,
I apologize for not responding sooner. As you can imagine, I was quickly drowned in work once I got back. Your letter touched my soul in so many ways. First, your awareness and choice of words and how you articulate them together, are mesmerizing. You are a truly gifted artist with strong depth.
The journey you are about to embark on is one of great respect and inspiration. I know you will touch many lives, however slight, but most likely grand as you have done so far, and I am sure of that. Without knowing you in a material physical aspect (as in only speaking with you for a brief 30 seconds), you have already impacted my life, which I will never forget.
With that being said, I would love to be your pen pal and hear all about the moments you experience. I have so much respect for you, people like you are those who make a difference in our world for the greater good. Even if it is to put a smile on a stranger’s face.
Send me your address. We will be hand-writing letters to each other very soon.
Yours truly,
Chanel
+++
Dear Ms. Chanie,
Such is the hard work of studying law, and surely it will be daunting, but you will persevere. Your words are quite kind and make me feel quite appreciated. It is a very complex task ahead and it makes me glad you will allow such correspondence. Although after 12 April I will be abroad more a year or more and with often an unreliable postal system, we can alternate pen and email as you see fit, and of the letters you send to the address below can be pony expressed or scanned and sent. Any art I make out there, same route. Cuba and Russia will be short, wonderful extremes before I get into Iraq in late May and soon after North Syria; a place called Rojava.
I make drawings, and paintings, I make long rhyming poems and I’ve written some novels, but I suppose it just makes me incredibly happy to have a chance to put my mind before a stranger and see yours as you reveal it. As said, the idea of you was strange magic, but I long to know the actual you as well and make you the subject of my art. It will also be surely relieving to sometimes hear of Boston, and your woes of scholarship, and your loves and losses and all. I thrive on the attention of strangers and can only be well informed via their impartial critiques. But, as stated, you were fascinating to me.
Best wishes, Happy International Women’s Day! I look forward to our next exchange.
+++
Dearest Sebastian,
Words cannot describe the appreciation I feel. I’ve always felt as if I was maybe underestimated by my looks and at times may be overestimated in this judgmental society we live in. Everything is based on how you look and not what you offer as a human.
Yet,
You made me feel like although that does come into play, you made me feel much more than that with eyes beyond the physicality of objects of this world with your attention to detail. It is not the mere creation of technique, but what it intends to portray with the story it wants to tell.
I am so thankful to the universe for that day, in so many ways, and one being our casual, brief and meaningful kindle.
Funny story; my overprotective brother thought I was giving you my phone number & got a little mad. I explained to him and told him it was okay; he trusts my judgment. And to be honest… it was your old-school way of a notepad and pen that really played well with my instinct. I am an old soul too.
I love candles, how did you know? I cannot wait and look forward to hearing about your future endeavors. You will be receiving something from me by early next week :) Again, Thank you!
“Yulia is dead,” Kreminizer wrote to me. Michael Kreminzer had done more to train me as a paramedic than anyone else. A horrible feeling, feeling someone strong buckling, being in the shadow of their dark feelings.
“She and I never had that great art and writing collabo moment we always talked about.”
“And now you never will. She died on Tuesday.”
She was one of the very few that had ever read deeply into any of my books. Kreminizer was one of the men who trained me as a Paramedic. Now his woman was dead from a cancer.
I was in Al-Brooklyn, U.A.S. The heart of a party and the very soul of New-York-Grad; “the big apple”. The “city that never sleeps” or “slept and now sleeps no more”. In a clear and well-furnished safe house abutting the J-M-Z line. I never want to go above $800.00 for a room at a safe house. Okay, I’ll rephrase that. $800.00 is the cap my budget can allow such a room. I always pay cash; I never sign anything. I always put down one month in advance. The people I must live with are all just as shady as I am. In terms of a safe house, what you’re basically trying to establish is secrecy and staging. You can’t have anyone in the security apparatus know where it is of course, you need it to be hiding in plain sight.
“Don’t bring your lovers to the safe house. Bring them to a fucking hotel,” is what Brit the German lesbian comrade always tells me.
There are a ton of women in my life, but they all do different very things, chemically electrically speaking. Without them, I would perhaps not have as much supporting strength to carry my beleaguered little projects out into the world in the face of great risk, there would also not be as much love or hope in me. Or as Kurds like to say, “Motivation.”
Broadly, I could say there are women I fuck and who I don’t fuck, love and who I don’t feel that much at all, but there is a lot more to it than that distinction. Friends with benefits competing with lovers who are impossible to win, buttressed by ex-girlfriends who still want to help the cause. I learned about Jinology in Kurdistan, but I’m not sure if it all stuck.
The “Science of Women” (Jinology) cannot be taught in two days and much of what it has to say is just a radical take on feminism. For instance, that for every position of power should be co-chairs; a male and a female running the show together. Women are not special, or complicated. In many ways they are just the same as men. I like listening to them more though, I appreciate the near constant feminine presence in my life. I take their advice and also their leadership.
Jineology—derived from the Kurdish word “jin” meaning woman, and “logos” meaning science—is a revolutionary concept born from the Kurdish women’s movement and shaped by the imprisoned thinker Abdullah Öcalan. At its core, it holds that the liberation of society is impossible without the liberation of women. In fact, it goes further: it sees the systematic subjugation of women as the first and deepest form of oppression—one that laid the groundwork for class domination, ecological destruction, and authoritarian state power. To confront this foundational injustice, Jineology proposes not only a critique but a new science altogether—one that reclaims knowledge, identity, and power from the ruins of patriarchy. Unlike many Western feminist theories, which Jineology respects but often views as too individualistic or bound to liberalism, this science of women seeks a collective, historical, and grounded approach. It emerges from the lived experiences of Kurdish women resisting war, colonialism, and male domination. It is not an academic discourse but a lived practice. In the villages, in the mountains, in the war zones, women gather to study, reflect, and lead. They do not just read about history—they rewrite it. Jineology teaches that before kings and borders, there were matriarchal societies; before property and state, there was communal life centered around women, the life-givers and caretakers of the earth.
This knowledge, long buried under the weight of conquest and empire, is being unearthed and revived. Jineology looks to the ancient goddesses of Mesopotamia, to Neolithic communities, to myth and oral tradition. It challenges the idea that science must be male, mechanical, and detached. Instead, it offers a science rooted in ethics, ecology, and freedom. A science that sees not control, but relationship. In this view, every system—whether economic, political, or social—must be measured by how it treats women. The revolution begins with the dignity of the grandmother, the autonomy of the daughter, the choices of the mother.
In the liberated zones of Rojava in northeastern Syria, Jineology is more than theory. It is curriculum. Every woman fighter of the YPJ learns it. Every commune discusses it. In the “Mala Jin”—the women’s houses where community disputes are resolved and education is shared—Jineology is the heartbeat of decision-making. It teaches that power is to be shared, not hoarded. That every leadership role must be held by one man and one woman. That self-defense is not only against bullets, but against the domination of mind and spirit. In refugee camps, in front-line towns, in classrooms lit by solar panels and hope, this science becomes not an abstraction, but a way of life.
To those who take up arms or pens in its name, Jineology is both shield and song. It says that women are not just half the sky—they are the foundation beneath it. For internationalist volunteers like Anna Campbell, who left the safety of Britain to fight and die alongside Kurdish women in Afrin, Jineology was not only an idea—it was her compass. It answered the question of what it meant to be free. Not just free from tyranny, but free to reimagine everything: justice, history, love. A revolution led by women, not as tokens, but as origin, principle, and future.
They all want something different, though, but the same. And it’s all built on the foundation of friendship, like any healthy relationship. The way they pity me is different. Very few admire me, well they do but the pity instinct is a greater driver of their behavior. Or the way my work inspires them.
Goldy Andreavna is no longer answering my calls or returning my letters. She had had enough. It sure is cold. And the worst parts of me just want to die. Life is thankless, and I am aware that it is also very cruel to most of my human people. That all makes me want to fight, but I’m sure I’ll just make myself into a new statistic. The train rattles by on the above ground track next to the room I’m renting. It doesn’t sound like the ocean at all. It sounds like living in poverty next to plenty. I worked 80 hours this week. I still can’t manage to sleep.
“A hero or a hooligan, well that part’s never clear.” I would have them put that Mighty Mighty Bosstones lyric on my tombstone if I believed they would ever find my body or figure out how to make me die. I lean towards Hooligan in depicting myself, “lower your flighty expectations”. I will not live up to your expectations for me and my agency, me and my powers. I am an easily broken man running from capitalist modernity into dreams, poems and the world beyond American reach.
It was the icy cold night of Purim in the Hebrew year 5777. Super fucking Futuristic. The full moon was huge, and it was brick as shit, it was Friday, everyone was drunk. But that had nothing to do with their silly drunk festival called Purim. The coldness goes right through his sheets, through his comforter, the space heater doesn’t start up right away. It’s a fire trap in here with all the subdivided dry walls. But it’s brick, as the brothers say, no matter how many layers I put over him. That means harshly cold in the Ebony peasant vernacular. He knew that were I so inclined there would be multiple places to fete and masquerade tonight, but I was conserving my finances. Hoarding up my comfortable sleeps on his big Queen-sized mattress made in Brooklyn that he’d lashed now three times to the roof of my civic and trafficked about the borough. Moving rooms in safe houses. Working everyday towards my next operation. Nothing is given to you in the movement. You have to earn or take initiative. That can appear attractive to women, sometimes, for a bit. But he’s basically broke as well as broken.
The safe house isn’t so bad. It has high ceilings. The train is obnoxious, and the neighborhood used to be a war zone. It’s still dirty. There are still robberies every day. But the rent was a square $800, which was reasonable. Things were gentrifying here in the Bed Stuy-Bushwhack area. Still looked and felt like the ghetto Adonaev worked the 37 Bravo unit in. It still looked like the dark place Rahula died in.
That was our first “American Martyr”, shot himself twice in the head. But now there were white hipsters and cafes. It was a cute place except for a couple little things. Like the no drinking rule which annoyed me and the German intelligence officer slash painter greatly.
Her name was Brit Tully, and we did time together in the camps a few years back. She never admitted to being such, but this is what my associate Alan Medved told Adon, and he knew about such things. Brit was a metal worker, glass worker and an introvert. Her square job was retail in a fancy SoHo denim outlet. We co-habited the domicile, a medium spacious loft on the third floor of Broadway across from the J & M above ground rail line and, I can’t say any more precisely where; I can’t tell you; it’s a safe house. It was Brit Tully in the small middle room, with my room to the right and Handler Hicks to the left. A fucking nut. We had all these hippy rules none of us followed and we both kind of hated him, he was a shifty fuck.
The man who set up this little shop was none other than the infamous small-time publisher and writer Handler Hicks, who for a lesser intellectual was wild eyed.
And somewhat muscular and vigorous looking from being straight edge, being Zen and believing that “God is Good!” He is a total nut who fixates on 9/11 conspiracy theories and has all the tendencies of being a junky off junk. His little boy, when custody allowed as always there every other weekend, looked feeble. Looking malnourished and unhappy to be there, yet chipper. Handler is an endless passive aggressive pain in the ass, but Brit and Sebastian Adonaev need a house for a cash and paper trail, and you get what you pay for in this city.
The handler took me in when the safe house just before it got too hot. Right before I skipped town to Baltimore to get my assignment from the local committee. A safe house falls apart for two main reasons; too much traffic or drama among spies. This place Brooklyn is infested these days with whores, with criminal scum, with sedition and with spies. It’s a good staging area for working in the city with no papers.
Natasha Salzano, which was just her passport name was a cold cunt. Natalia Chicherova, which was her name in Russia, had fled almost overnight back to Russian Federation and left me and poor confused student Tanya Drozdova, basically squatting a lovely grand place on Eastern Parkway with the rent supposedly 8,000 plus dollars in arrears. I made off with a fancy mirror and my gear in almost the dead of night.
A couple things about a good safe house, it’s hard to find. And frankly the Russians have too many rules and idiosyncrasies. Like if you live with a woman and you keep leaving the seat up, or water on the floor after you shower; a good fucking or not fucking or two, some talk it out and you can be socialized. In a safe house, whoever is on the lease is the boss.
Natasha’s whole thing was always “touching her stuff” which was all over the place, but even a slight movement of the cutting board, or moving the walk in storage closet around; she’d flip. She was tall and bleached, she was stern. She claimed she had gotten a master’s in international communications, but who knew. She left Tanya and I with a flat where the rent hadn’t been paid in months, the landlord was threatening to evict us; and she took off back to Russia. There was Mongol in her, I could sense it, and she never smiled but the now defunct safe house on Church & Eastern Parkway was quite luxurious for my tastes. She had basically turned the entire living room into my room and with it came really, nice stuff which incrementally she sold, and the Mirror well I guess I stole. Her last words in an email were, “calm the fuck down you’re acting like a stupid fucking American! Everything’s gonna be fine!”
I didn’t pay her last month’s rent because Tanya said she’d just rob it and leave us high and dry anyway. But if one day I bump into her in Russian and she has a tough guy kill me over $735, well, that’s life. I’d kill someone over no less than 5,000 and depend on what they’d done to deserve it.
Comrade roommate-sublessor Handler Hicks had written and gotten published two books on 9/11 Truth and was maybe the figurehead of that rabble band of conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites. Anti-Zionists, excuse me. His first book was that the government did it, the second was that the Saudis were in on it too and after a recent trip to Iran, well his third book is about the Zionist angle, which I’m sure will go over great here and get rave reviews. I guess he didn’t get the memo that the best way to be hated in America by everyone was to keep talking about 911 conspiracy theories. I know for sure I read that memo in 2001. Moving on, it got so damn suddenly cold. It had been jeans and t-shirt weather in March. It had been the most limp, listless winter ever, or maybe I was still traumatized by the two-year winter of Boston and the Blizzard of 2010. I had invested in a long heavy Soviet grey coat, and layers of thermal underwear as well as an Ushanka. The big furry hat everyone knows and loves. Fucking around with the contents of my desk I find some letters from Adelina Blazenaya, a lover long gone. She called me some time a year ago on the road to Washington D.C.
And really, I never heard from her again. Like someone with a better, more giving dick inside her or maybe her conscience ordered her not speak with ever me. I have three love letters she wrote me and I carry them around in the black leather party envelope I was issued in Haiti. I try quite hard to break that silence of hers. To get friendship or something more or less than that. No dice ever. Legally speaking, I’ve left her 33% of this new shell company if I’m killed in the coming deployment.
I’m rambling about nothing useful. My existential first world concerns my laptop; I’m comparing gear I need to procure. Bags, boots, and devices. I’ll expropriate them with a fabricated credit card. About 2,000 worth of kit. Maybe I’ll even get a new laptop. If anyone manages to rob me on the road from Havana to Qamishli, well it would be a damn good haul.
Comrade Handler is out first every night. He sometimes reads in the living room; we wait it out in our rooms. Brit and I are almost pure night creatures. Once I was fired from my slave job about three weeks ago, I immediately reverted to my preferred biological clock. I’d been waking up at 445 am all summer and fall to drive to the ambulance base in the Rockaways. Now I’d wake up at 1 to 2pm and go to bed at 5am to 6am. I just like working at night, less witnesses? I’m sitting at the big, long wooden table Handler built. It’s shoddy work like the bunk beds he builds. He’s a carpenter by trade, like my man Jesus was. But he’s chicken shit. This safe house is ok. Even if we can’t drink here. I think Brit does heroin in her room or at the very least smokes dope on the roof, she’s great though. Never emotional and always objective, she’s going back to Berlin soon, her casework never comes up and isn’t polite conversation.
We were imprisoned in a detention facility in 2013. Now the year is 2016. She had handed me her email address on a green paper with a Walt Whitman quote, something about nothing. Well anyway many years later, like six months ago I found it and when Handler subdivided the loft into three rooms I social engineered her in, but she was my second choice. I’d really wanted to live with my friend Erin Moore who is dark humored and funny and can cook her ass off. But frankly Handler sketched her out too much. The subdivide room was also not such a steal ever for $600 USD, and maybe a little firetrap hazardous.
I plan to drug Handlers and burn him still alive in his home the night after I leave the states. That’s not because he gets under my skin. It’s because he is working for the Iranians and that’s what Brit and I were paid to do. Burn him alive. Weird fantasies of murder still pop in and out of my head from time to time, but I’m a medical man in the emergency Pre-hospital health field.
The thing about a safe house is that you don’t tell anyone where it is, you don’t have your name on it, you pay cash and don’t sign anything, and everyone in it is a superhero in their own mind. And you don’t pick up a blonde bimbo hipster in a bar and bring her back there to savagely fuck her in every hole in her body with a belt around her neck. How do I say that again, the people living in a safe house are shady fucking gypsies? The people living in safe houses, like me, have something to perhaps hide? Or for people just too unstable in credit and finances to sign a lease. It could be a few factors.
Brit is supposedly “German intelligence”. Handler is a well-known brilliant crack pot being paid by the Iranians to enlarge the American propaganda base of Press TV. Also, the undisputed leader of a 16-year effort to uncover 9/11 Truth. Most things seemed to tick back to that. His father is a famous IMF economist. He single handedly helped push an unauthorized biography on George W. Bush to market via his printing house, and then that man “killed himself” and that seemed to weigh on Handler, and behind the hippy Zen retreats, the walls of books that he had in fact read, he was always reading, or pretending to be reading behind the chirpy banter was a killer. An Iranian propaganda asset. And I was going to dope him up with benzo sedatives and literally cook him alive.
I say that still having shared Rosh Hashanah with him, that means Hebrew New Years; and we cooked for each other the cuisine of vegetarian poverty goulash, and yes once he threatened to throw me out, and yes like Natasha he was a total tyrant, but I played several times with his dorky little scientist son, the fucker was so precocious. I don’t mean to talk so much shit; I’m working on it. I’m in shit talking recovery!
I am not a great person all of the time. I fucked that little hipster like a Ukrainian by the hour. Her face to the wooden floor and my cock up her ass. For something a lot like rape, she took it seven or eight times before I murdered Handlers and jumped country after Passover. Though those acts were perhaps not connected at all, in my mind they sort of connected to my own depravity.
Comrade Handler Hicks is a left-wing zealot; I respect him only for that. Shows some morale compass anyway. And about ten years my senior was in many ways what I worried a failed version of myself might look like complete with child and broken marriage. Fuck, I just did it again. I like him, he likes me, and he’s really not a bad guy in fact, he’s a lesser hero of this story I’m about to tell. But I will admit that I didn’t mind the idea of killing him. He was annoying and also human trash. Because the truth is Iran doesn’t have any shortage of agents in this city, and his theories on 9/11 aren’t that well received anywhere. And he’s big faggot dork; so why did a two-person hit team get sent to eventually cook him?
“Well, that’s because loose lips sink ships and traitors get put in the ground.”
I am one to think every other high-powered person living in the darkness is mental, a whore, a killer or a spy. It’s mostly true. It’s baseless. God only knows what they whisper about me back in the station or worse, the home office. They probably just say I’m crazy. But I am a paramedic, and it took me a while to reconcile that; helping and saving sometimes, murdering and torturing other times. But a man’s got-to-do what a man’s got to do.
So, this small plane is gonna take off from an airstrip on the south coast of Brooklyn near Queens Border and it’s gonna fly me low down the coast to Cuba. And pretty much I’m gonna sit on a beach and meditate with rum and pussy after a meeting with Cuban intelligence about my training system and how it works.
Then I’m gonna fly back to Brooklyn and trade tropical white linen clothes for Spring in Russia clothes and I’m gonna fly to Finland then Moscow and check into the hotel Metropole to meet my “new attaché” and confidant Ms. Polina Mazaeva, who I’ve never met but have corresponded with for about six months and seen naked many times, more on that later. Thanks to the internet. And she will take me by the trains to Nizhny Novgorod, check me into a hotel with an Irish Pub, a Sushi restaurant and Strip Club, all a New Yorker really needs, and we’re gonna be working on a few things. Getting some paperwork and concepts in order before I fly to Erbil, Iraq then infiltrate Syria to reach the Rojava Revolution sometime in the fall. But before I leave my city for a while, perhaps forever. Handler Hicks will die! If not by my hand, then his own. He’s a black hole or vile negative sucking energy.
Polina is a cozy, coy little red head doll. Died of course. She’s overly attentive to my interests and reads my work which is flattering since, honestly most Russian women take all my money and suck on my dick, try to rearrange my wardrobe and ride me for housing and good meals. That’s cheap, but no off. Polina is looking at editing my shortest book, which means she’s manipulating me for someone. She has a little kid, she lives in the fifth biggest Russian city Nizhny Novgorod, looks provincial and bleak. I’ve never been to the Russian Federation. It will not be hostile; well, it might be a little. It’s better when I don’t talk because vaguely, I look like them. That is what people say.
A translation of a book about Haiti into Russian, a collaboration called ‘Endless Walk’ which you are now reading; and how we can pose as a family with her seven-year-old son Yazan and secure work visas for Dubai, in the heart of the United Arab Emirates. And then, we fall in love. Or I’ll use her, and she’ll use me, and when it stops working, we can part as nothing.
But mostly my heart is cold, but I still know how to talk soothingly to a woman and I am governed by both the Code of the Haitian Gentleman, Hebrew tribal law and the desire to be a good communist; so whatever happens between is of course, or course based on consent and mutual admiration for the work of the other. She is a talented singer, a painter and really too much of an artist for Russia’s third to fifth biggest city. She should be in Moscow, London or New York; her son has her pinned down though and wages are low in Russia. She makes her pittances as a graphic designer. They pay her jackbumsquat, which is my gibberish for fucking less than nothing. She lives with her kid, her brother and her parents in what looks worse than an American housing project.
I’m looking forward to May Day in the Capital and Victory Day in Nizhny, which according to my research survived the Mongol horde invasions nicely, combatively speaking. Those savage fucking Mongols.
Then I’ll load into a plane at GOJ Nizhny, fly to Istanbul, then provided I am not arrested and detained, head into Iraqi Kurdistan as we like to call it; Erbil City. And wait for Demhat al-Jabari, my colleague and fellow card-carrying D/U associate, to arrive a week later so we get to Sulaymaniyah, contact the resistance and be smuggled into Syrian Kurdistan, over the border into the Rojava Federation. It’s very exciting to me anyway, I’ve wanted to see all these places for years, but for two years I’ve been an ambulance slave. My operational budget is a lot leaner than last time; I am trying to get a good price for my car, but all the prices have sucked; I did too much damage to it using it like an ambulance. $2650 is the best price so far for a no-frills 2009 Honda Civic with paramedic plates and 58,000 miles, which Brit says is low, like I only drive in circles in this dark city rat race, with a two-year little exile in Boston.
“I’ve been to Russia in a past life or been Russian in a past life either one”, which I hope to see again in my present and future. I spend most of my time in the Russian quarter on the Brooklyn coast. I like everything about them. I can go deep or very, very shallow on it. I have read several dozen pieces of Russian literature and deeply admire the effort of the Soviet Union. I was blowing the coke off a Bulgarian lady friend’s tit the morning after my 33rd birthday. I liked it a lot, but it felt also disgusting and cheap, and I couldn’t bring myself to fuck her, so I paid and left. I guess Comrade Malcolm Veshanti, one of our comrades who stayed up all night with us, I can’t confirm but I think she passed out there at the Harlem brothel, woke up and fucked her.
So there I was making a procurement list and seeing how I could raise a little cash here and there without breaking too many laws, and safe house, the high ceilings with pipes running across was so quiet only the pitter patter of my keyboard, and, Handler was asleep since 11:43pm and Brit was out not long after and I just felt compelled to get my inventory logs sorted, my deployment budge square, file the logs; transcribe some poems I found in a little notebook to Adelina, send them to her, no response. Svetlana, her confidant messaged me on the book face that she did wish me luck, I pretended Adelina was there with her watching me type.
Sveta says she had a man now and was surely happy. I hope she’s happy and motherfucker isn’t twice her age. It might seem like I have all these lovers laying around, or like I’m a cold confused whore mongering whatever I am; but no. That’s not true. Generally, I have a free life partner, she bares me and the movement for a year or two, and she tries to save or fix or improve me; get me out of the movement and into medical school; then ultimately breaks it off when I do some time. I’ve spent 2 ½ years of my life inside camps cells and involuntary detention.
I’m not a cheat; I don’t beat women up except when they like that in bed. Which seems like a lot, leading me to question my own sweetness. I paid for everything. I dress well, I’m smart and an artist. I’m a decorated hero paramedic. I’ve written 8 books. I’m just a little bit crazy. And I’m a communist. And I do think those things are fine in Russian Federation, no cause for alarm like here. I did bring not one but two pairs of handcuffs to put Polina in, which is kinky but also tasteless and savage.
Tonight, just after midnight the man who helped the most to train me as a paramedic Mikhail Kreminizer messages me. His wife, maybe just his longtime girlfriend, has just died, will be cremated in the morning. That’s the way poor people do it. Burying people isn’t cost effective. It can cost over forty grand.
You must understand this man is a tank. A big Russian (really Lithuanian) Israeli storm trooper who used to torture people, Palestinians specifically. May or may not be a Mason, definitely some kind of strange Q-ANON enthusiast. has killed men with his bare hands and now operates an ambulance in midtown Manhattan. Trying to save his own soul which he barely believes in? Not for money. No one gets saved on ambulances. It’s all a profiteering machine of mythology and greed.
After the secret police broke up our attempt to hold the 9th Congress of the Association & Union in North Brooklyn, after they raped my Polina Mazaeva and tortured me for 5 weeks until the underground could force my ransom; after we bombed the five Strip clubs on Victory Day, after we kidnapped the Satmar Rabbi, well I was too hot for a lot of people in 2016 and Michael had to distance himself from me and withdraw his orbit of protection, which was as vast as he is tall.
“Yulia is dead,” Kreminizer has just written to me. A horrible feeling, feeling someone who is very strong buckle, being in the shadow of their horrible feeling.
“She and I never had that great art and writing collabo moment we always talked about.”
“And you never will. She died on Tuesday.”
“Fuck. I’m so sorry.”
“Ain Davar.”
“No, that’s horrible. I’m so sorry Michael. I know how much you loved her.”
“Yup. I just came from New Jersey. She will get cremated tomorrow.”
“I remember it was two summers ago. Yulia and I were on the phone, and I was so manic, and we were talking about her illustrating my book.”
“Well. That won’t happen.”
“Not in this life, no.”
“Agree.”
“In the world to come maybe she will be willing. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m going to get some rest. Good night, buddy.”
I hate it when he calls me “buddy”, but his main chick is dead.
“Good night.”
“I’m leaving the States on April 12th for Adelina’s birthday. I’m sure you prefer to suffer in silence, but if you want to hang out. I’ll drive out your way. She loved you so much.”
“We will see how I feel in the morning. Where are you going this time?” he asks me.
“Cuba. Then Russia. Iraq and then Syria. I’ll leave the night after Passover.”
“Be careful. You were just lucky the last few times. Those are all more dangerous places than Haiti.”
“Yeah. But I’ve got more men and training now. A good team. A real fine outfit.”
“Only reason you’re still alive.”
“I’ll try and get to see you more than the one-year usual. I do not only feel your pain, but I know it like I know my own mask of a face.”
He doesn’t reply because he doesn’t have to pretend to be strong, but I felt a small cry in me, this man had patiently precept-ed and apprenticed into paramedicine, my secondary trade, but first love trade; he had shown me how to put IVs in the dark with feel, while in a moving vehicle at high speeds, he’d talked me through heart blocks, and my own blocked heart over Goldy, and always treated me like an Israeli, not an American even though I’m really from here, wink. He taught me how to interrogate traffickers with the EKG monitor, how to start or stop the human heart, he was patient with me, he didn’t have to take that time I was on the blacklist I’d never be allowed on a good truck, a 911 truck again.
I feel this great knot of sadness because Michael Kreminizer suddenly has nothing to live for and does not fear g-d or devils; his self-destruction is frankly inevitable.
You must always be ready for suicide watch dealing with our kind, dealing with high energy people, empaths, bipolar ones, bonobos, whatever. We feel too much and frankly get a little self-destructive which is why so many join the service and why so many die off the job where no one can see it happen. Michael is a hard man. And he killed so many people he had to stay working to balance it out, but I know, I know he loved her, loves her so much. And this could be one thing. I have to stop. Stop, the archangel won’t die tonight or tomorrow, and you haven’t even seen him in a year? Two years? Three years? Four years? Stupid time, like a lot of people he said he’d be my reference, but worried about me. And didn’t have time for the hootenanny I got into. He called me Chechen once, because he could read into me and see many of my past lives. I felt so sad, like I had not been sad in so long and I thought about Adelina. What would I do if she took me back and we made a life and then died?
Suicide rates are actual low in Israel. And I was allegedly born in Trinidad and Michael was born in Lithuania, USSR, but we’re both Ivory. We’re both paramedics. We’re both parapsychologists. We’re both a lot past crazy. We both love Russian women. He’s the size of a killer robot made of steel from the future, but this could kill him. If anything could, this could.
“One by one having fun tonight, if she only knew what I did for life, it’s an endless walk of dreams versus nightmare.”
“Don’t leave me alone,” the dancehall song says.
Late at night, I join Comrade Brit on the roof for a smoke. We were sure looking off the safe house roof, the city visible 5 miles out, the evil stack house of Woodhull hospital within rocket range and the tallest city project on Myrtle Ave, the sniper nest in days to come, we were sure it was jeans and t-shirt day, because Brit Tully and I were wearing jeans and t-shirt, well I was. Brit almost always wore black and on top a black overcoat which had seen its prime some time ago, like my ideals. We were smoking some of her American Spirit dark greens and I hadn’t slept in 24 hours. It was really nice out for mid-March; it had never gotten cold in December, January or even February.
“They are conserving the weather machine for when it matters,” Brit said, and I agreed.
She was so dark, introverted, and cynical, as well as a lesbian. We only went out together a handful of times, but we smoked on the roof together a lot and both hated the passive aggressive Handler. Brit would always say she’d leave for a lover in German, soon, I always said I’d leave for revolution in Syria, any day now. We were both suffering in the Brooklyn ghetto, in the loft of Handler Hicks the conspiracy theorist and Iranian puppet man. Who we had just been paid to rub out of circulation. But you can’t just kill a man and get away with it in the United States. You must be realistic about that. We weren’t really gonna light him on fire, nobody really paid us to kill him and neither of us were really intelligence agents. We were all just living in relative poverty of conscience and slight material poverty deep in the Brooklyn labor ghetto, where you lived paycheck to paycheck. Where your collar is blue shade.
“It was all just a transit point to death or possible greatness. But a pointless death is more likely to come first and make the second proposition meaningless. What use is greatness when you cannot see the results of it?”
“You sure make a lot of dumb American movie like inner monologues when you smoke,” says Brit the German spy.
But there was no need for presumption, and it was just a jokingly used phrase; the two of them had served in an international brigade before, 3 years ago, in Haiti.
ADONEAV
I have known Comrade Peter Saint Reed, the marine, since the long, sweltering summer of 2014. We served together for three months in Croix-Des-Bouquets, Haiti. Staffing a small fort where about forty Haitian patriots were being clandestinely trained as emergency medical technicians, community health workers, and combat medics. We were developing and implementing the fourth version of the remote EMT training program in Haiti on behalf of several underground Haitian political parties and their diaspora. I am unabashedly a fan of his work.
PETER SAINT REED
“We could liberate this whole damn country with less than 40 women and men,” he had once said about Haiti. “We could take the whole place over and end all the bullshit.”
ADONAEV
“Liberate” is very relative word, but what he meant to say in his own cowboy marine way was that the Haitian people could cast off foreign oppression with a relatively small armed force.”
PETER SAINT REED
“No. I meant we could just take over the whole country with 40 people.”
ADONAEV
But we wouldn’t be able to hold it. The Haitians have a lot of fight.
PETER SAINT REED
If ten of us are marines, we can fucking hold it.
Sometimes their world views were not aligned, but in general their hearts were in a good place. Only shortly after that 2014 training operation in Haiti, Saint Reed bought a one-way ticket to Erbil in the Kurdish region Iraq and subsequently enlisted with a group of Slovakian mercenaries. They were a Mottley group of foreigners, mostly former military, providing medical aid to the Peshmerga forces. It is widely understood that his bravery and EMT training saved many lives.
“I saw you again on the news,” Sebastian wrote to him at one point, “I envy you and think what you are doing is particularly important. I’ll contact you when my team is coming over the border to join up.”
The boy was bleeding again. His mother, Hamdiya, dragged him across the dust, one hand clutching a dirty IV bag, the other clamped to the arm of her nine-year-old son, Thanoor. His wound — a sliver of metal in the neck — throbbed with each step. It was morning in Mosul, but no one had seen morning in years. They had only seen light followed by war. The clinic was a ruin disguised as hope. Sandbags, burned tea, half-melted gloves. Two Americans — Pete Reed and Derek Coleman — sat against the wall, sweat streaking down their necks, waiting for the next wave of wounded. Reed had the look of a man who’d seen too much, and Coleman had the look of someone trying not to feel anything at all. Reed muttered. Now he patched necks and carried children across hell. They told Hamdiya to take her son to a real hospital. There was still shrapnel in him, and the clinic — held together by Iraqi medics, borrowed supplies, and the will of a Slovak-American NGO — was barely a dressing station. The journey should’ve taken an hour. It took five. Checkpoints. Ethnic suspicion. Kurdish soldiers telling her, “He looks fine.” At the hospital, they said: “You’re Arab. Why are you here?”
She returned to the clinic hollow-eyed, her son worse. The clinic had nothing left but apologies.
Reed and Coleman had come to fight. They stayed to save. They weren’t doctors — just men who couldn’t sit still while others bled. They worked with the Kurds until the war shifted and the front moved. They bluffed their way through checkpoints. They knew that many of the people they treated would die somewhere on the road to Erbil.
“We just try to give them more time,” said Coleman, looking at the blood on his boots.
Reed smoked and stared into the distance like a man already dead. “The waiting is the worst,” he said. “It gives you time to remember who didn’t make it.”
They stabilized patients. That’s all. The war did the rest. A Humvee skidded into the courtyard. Two brothers were dragged out, mortar wounds gaping. Ali Khalil died before they could even say his name. Umar lived — if one can call that living. “Where’s my brother?” he whispered.
“Don’t worry,” said the medic. “He’s fine.”
Outside, the neighbor wailed. They had to get Ali’s body back to Mosul, but checkpoints demanded papers, and the family had none. They wrapped the corpse in a blanket and left for the graveyard under gunfire. As they vanished into the horizon, the courtyard went silent again. A young soldier resumed mopping the floor. Another man was brought in. Shot in the spine, legs useless. “My legs… my legs,” he whimpered. The medic prodded his feet with scissors. No response.
“This is not good,” he said softly, to no one.
In Baghdad, there were forms. In Erbil, there were offices. None of them could help. Psychological care is a myth. Coordination — a joke. Supplies came late. Ambulances came later. Sometimes, not at all. “Even if ISIS doesn’t kill you,” someone said, “the inefficiency will.” Reed didn’t laugh.
Reported by Mr. Gareth Browne on 18 December 2016:
“Meet the U.S. volunteers treating patients at a front-line clinic in Mosul! Pete Reed, and Derek Coleman both 27, catch their breath during one of the many long waits at a frontline medical clinic in Eastern Mosul.”
“MOSUL, Iraq – Grasping her son’s arm in one hand, and a saline drip in the other, Hamdiya Saleh stumbled across the dirt. The 30-year-old Mosulawi had walked for several hours, her black abaya trailing on the ground, to the motley Al-Samah Clinic in the Al-Samah neighborhood of eastern Mosul. Just five days ago, her nine-year-old son Thanoor Saleh was caught in the blast of an Islamic State group mortar. Their home, in the now partially liberated neighborhood of Aden in eastern Mosul, is often the target of reprisal IS mortar attacks on as much as an hourly basis. While playing in the street outside his home, Thanoor took a piece of shrapnel to the neck. Despite receiving near immediate treatment, the injury is still causing him problems, and this clinic staffed by Iraqi special forces medics with the help of the Academy of Emergency Medicine, a Slovak-US NGO, is the only front-line clinic in the east of the city. It is the only help they can reach. Hamdiya and her young son, seeking follow-up medical treatment, are among the first to arrive at the clinic early that morning. Pete Reed, 27, from Trenton, New Jersey, is a bearded former US marine with two tours of Afghanistan under his belt and a commanding presence, now helping to run the clinic.”
After leaving the marines, he spent time working as a ski instructor, but was drawn to Iraq late last year, originally to fight alongside the Kurds, but it quickly became evident that his skills as a combat medic were of far greater value. He instructs Hamdiya to take her son to the hospital. There is still shrapnel in his wound, and he requires treatment. The treatment may require surgery, and with those at the clinic only trained in basic trauma medical care, it goes beyond their remit. Iraqi army medics, with the help of medics from US-Slovak NGO, fight to save a young boy with shrapnel wounds from indiscriminate mortar fire carried out by the Islamic State.
The journey should take no more than one hour, but between these eastern outskirts of Mosul and Erbil there lie at least 4 checkpoints, some controlled by the Iraqi army, and beyond that by the Kurdish Peshmerga.
The journey via ambulance should be straightforward, but this is the humanitarian front line in the war against IS, and nothing is as it should be. Hamdiya returns to the clinic later that afternoon, just as the medics are packing up like shopkeepers after a long day of trade. She told of how she and her son were arbitrarily stopped at two Peshmerga checkpoints, and the journey took almost five hours. Some of the soldiers insisted that “there was nothing wrong with him”, and he did not need treatment. Then upon arriving at the hospital, Hamdiya was asked: “Why are you here? You’re Arab,” before being turned away.
Arab-Kurdish tensions have ratcheted up in recent weeks, and many Kurds are intensely suspicious of Sunnis fleeing the largely Arab city of Mosul. Following the liberation of Ramadi earlier in the year, ISIS attempted to use abaya-clad women to attack checkpoints, the explosive vests hidden away under their garments. Male fighters have also attempted to flee the embattled city, posing as civilians, making life even more difficult for those citizens genuinely trying to flee.
“We just do what we can to help win!” says Peter Saint Reed.
What happened to Hamdiya was not an isolated incident. First Sergeant Ghali, the mustached spokesman of the elite Counter Terrorism Unit’s medical corps unit in charge of running the clinic, says it is “happening every day,” adding “sometimes we have to send people to Baghdad [400 km away] for treatment.” The clinic is officially an Iraqi army installation, but the support of the NGO is both welcome and necessary. Iraqi army medics and the NGO staff – particularly Reed and Coleman – work hand in hand treating patients, maintaining the clinic and sourcing supplies. The two came to Iraq late last year with the vague notion of wanting to help in the battle against Islamic State. Instead, it was providing basic trauma medical care and training that they deemed the most effective means of helping. They worked initially with the Kurdish Peshmerga, and only in recent weeks joined up with Iraqi forces, sweet talking generals and hustling their way through military checkpoints as “Special Forces”. They openly admit they have been “blagging it.”
“This delay and sometimes denial of surgery and more advanced medical treatment is costing lives, as Reed acknowledges: “We know that a lot of people we patch up here die n route to the hospitals in Erbil, we just do what we can”. Saint Reed, a former US combat Marine, battles to stop a patient bleeding. This is just one of dozens of patients treated in the clinic every day.”
Reed’s colleague Derek Coleman adds: “The medical care after us is the weak link; all we can really do is stabilize people and give them a bit more time. The suspicion of IS fighters and supporters doesn’t help, nor do this part of Iraq’s long-standing Arab-Kurdish tensions.” Periods at the clinic consist of long waits – moments of reflection disrupted by a heavy influx of patients. It is during one of these interim periods that a macabre sense humor and deep conversation about what exactly is going on take place. As Reed says, dragging on a cigarette and sipping from a can of home-brand energy drink, “some days we’ll have 60 patients, other days it’s only 25, but that doesn’t make it any easier, because in the interim you just have more time to think about who you had today – the downtime makes it harder.”
“Reed’s colleague, Derek Coleman, 27, is a former machinist from San Diego, with only basic civilian medical training, but that hasn’t stopped him from trying to make a difference. Like Reed, he too initially came to Iraq to join the Kurds as a foreign fighter. But, he says, “I realized that was all bullshit, and this was a better use of my time.” The two are fiercely critical of the overall medical situation. “There is no coordination between the government and all the agencies, they all do their own thing,” says Coleman.”
It would be easy to dismiss the two as war junkies, and indeed some have. Coleman, however, seems to be a well-read and intelligent man. He tends to casually drop the likes of John Stuart Mill into the conversation and answers tough questions with reason, a far cry from the war junkie some have tried to paint him as being. Coleman recalls the case of a young girl he treated recently. “She didn’t make it,” he avoids eye contact, as his voice begins to break, “but I just remember trying to wash her blood off my hands; that was hard.”
Despite months of exposure to this suffering, he is anything but immune to the emotional effects. Similarly, it is clear that Reed is not just here for the ride. He has the sort of experience – providing critical care in conflict zones – that often makes the difference in tough cases where patients could go either way.
A conversation with Coleman about his favorite tanks is interrupted with the eerie sound of a Golden Division Humvee’s horn. Skidding to a halt, civilians drag two men from the vehicle – brothers, both injured in an Islamic State mortar attack. “Get him on oxygen,” yells Reed, seeing instantly that the first of the men pulled from the vehicle is in a critical state. Within minutes, the 27-year-old named Ali Khalil is declared dead, and focus switches to his brother Umar Khalil who lays on a stretcher in the building’s courtyard as his chest is bandaged. “How is my brother?” he asks repeatedly; “Don’t worry, he’s going to be fine,” whispers an Iraqi medic in his ear.
“But really we get almost no support from anyone,” Peter Saint Reed says.
Outside the clinic stands the brother’s neighbor, who is exhausted and covered in dust. With Umar stabilized, and Ali dead, they discuss what to do next. According to Islamic custom, after death a body should be buried as quickly as possible. “We can’t just bury him, his family must see the body,” shouts Ubay Abdel Basset, the neighbor who pulled Ali from the rubble. He explains that much of the family has fled Mosul to Erbil. But without identity cards, their car will likely be unable to cross checkpoints. They elect to return to Mosul, and with Ali’s body wrapped in a blanket, they board an Iraqi army Humvee and head for the family’s plot in a graveyard in the Mosul neighborhood of Qadisiya.
This is but one example of the logistical dilemmas friends and families increasingly find themselves facing as the civilian casualty rate climbs.
As the vehicle accelerates away, towards the sound of distant gunfire, Ali shouts: “Only God can help us. We will go back to Mosul. Maybe tomorrow we will die, but we will go back to Mosul.” And, as suddenly as they came, no more than 20 minutes after arriving, the patients are gone, and the clinic returns to a deathly silence, interrupted only by the slopping sound of a young Iraqi private mopping blood. Despite the great number of deaths, some of the toughest times ahead are for those that the clinic does manage to save. As the medics finish a lunch break, a middle-aged man is brought in, his arms slung over the shoulders of his father and a brother, and he is placed on the stretcher and whimpers a few barely audible words repeatedly – “my legs, my legs.”
Sami Abdul-Razaq has been shot in the back by an ISIS sniper while trying to flee the city despite carrying a white flag. An Iraqi medic frisks his pockets urgently searching for a key but settles on a pair of scissors sitting on the side. Using the sharp end, he prods the man’s feet searching for some sort of response but nothing. “This is not good,” he whispers to himself.
Psychological and physiological support for those who have survived serious injuries is not readily available in Iraq, and even where there is an NGO or government department in place to support patients, treatment is often delayed or incomplete due to a lack of coordination and bureaucracy. It is the same obstacles that often leave this clinic short on supplies or without an ambulance, and that leaves critically injured civilians stuck at army checkpoints for hours on end because of a lack of paperwork. As one ONG worker, who as usual declined to be named, said: “Even if the Islamic State doesn’t kill you, the chronic inefficiency in fighting them just might!” What a dumb fucking thing to say. But he is doing his all-American best to help defeat ISIS, and that is what counts.
“I am a comrade and have always been a comrade, that is that. That is all.”
My name is “the Tiger” or “Piling” in Kurdish. The Arabs have given me another name, but it is top secret. I later went on to kill many men in Deir-Ez Zor with the Dragunov sniper rifle I was given. I speak fluent Kurmanji so I was put in a Kadro unit. Party lifers who have sworn total allegiance to ‘the Revolution’ and Serok Apo. “Fanatics for the cause”, like me, actually. I grew up on the outskirts of Paris. In one of those “Arab ghettos”, you always see the riots happening in. I am of African descent thus I am not treated exactly like a French man. When I deployed to Rojava with the volunteers my family was harassed weekly. I was accused of joining Daesh and preparing for terrorism. The entire time I was there serving, I was stressed. So very stressed. The security service kept telling my Mom I was a “traitor to France”. France is one of countries with strict policies on entering the Y.P.G. as a volunteer. Like Britain they make your life a living hell and try confiscating your passport on reentry.
All people, in “La Resistance,” which is to say lePeople’s Protection Units (Y.P.G.) and Women’s Protection Units (Y.P.J.), will give you only a Kurdish guerrilla name,” says Heval Piling of Paris, France. He is the son of African immigrants that have settled in the outskirts of the French capital. Some are given their “heval name” by the P.K.K. cadros during the smuggle crossing from the base of the Qandil mountain over le Tigris River into northeast Syria’s Jazeera Canton. Others are given their nom de guerre in the first few days of their arrival at the guerrilla Academy near Qerechow. Some gain it beforehand through their affiliation with Kurdish Movement in Europe. There are probably under 100 names used. 20 of them are quite common and they are frequently recycled.
The training base is located amid the levers, pumps and minoring systems of the Ruemelin oil fields77, the original base and 22 foreign volunteers and Y.P.G./Y.P.J. fighters were incinerated in Turkish airstrikes which occurred in early May. You are given a first name and can choose your last name. And this is who you are while fighting for the “Revolution in Rojava”.
My code name means ‘The Tiger’. I heard a story before I left for Syria from a tall anarchist, code named HevalFirat. I am very paranoid about any press coverage or even photographs the French police are already harassing my family. I am a black so I will not be treated the same as other French. I am already under suspicion.
Heval Firat told me that after his first tour of six months he came back and held a small meeting of radicals. He told them of his time in Rojava and encouraged them to go experience the revolution themselves. He was arrested two days later. Clearly, an informant was in the meeting. He was charged with terrorism and recruitment of terrorists. His passport was confiscated, and it took him a year to travel to Rojava because getting it back was such meird. (Such shit).
Abdullah Ocalan’s face is absolutely everywhere in Rojava we have read. The sly, chubby brilliant revolutionary beaming out at us all from his prison cell in Imrili, should he still be alive. He is perhaps not alive. The Turkish fascists have held him hostage and tortured him since 1999. But this is his party and his revolution. One must accept the cult of Apo (which means uncle) because his leadership allowed miracles for the Kurdistan Workers Party (P.K.K.); yes ‘our P.K.K.’ survived the Cold War and is the last resistance movement left to challenge the West and its puppet Turkey. We are asked to read his books and understand his thinking before we enter the Y.P.G. because this is a revolutionary militia. We are fighting for far more than the destruction of Daesh!
I am an Anarcho-Syndicalist and a Platformist78. My group in France and Russian has sent to the Y.P.G. to make an assessment about its capabilities and Rojava’s potential for survival against the Turkish army once Daesh is eradicated. Groups like M.L.K.P.79 have for years used Rojava as a training ground and contributed hundreds of fighters to the cause. Not as many as the Jihadists certainly. But it is thought that more than half of the 500 volunteers were Turkish nationals with the M.L.K.P. I am to discover if my group can make a base here like they do. I am to discover if the Turks will just burn this whole revolutionary effort to the ground.
PILING
“I am very excited to join the armed struggle.”
It is inspiring what the Kurds have done since the Siege of Kobane when they were almost annihilated. Of course, the U.S. airstrikes saved them. Of course, as soon as ISIS is finished the Turks will sweep south to mop up this cordon of resistance the P.K.K. has built via its Syrian arm the P.Y.D. We are probably the last wave of foreigners that will go in. The logistics will get worse and the fight with Turkey will not be the same as the fight with Jihadists in Daesh.
I am good with a rifle. I know the language. They will respect me more because I have taken the time to learn Kurmanji, the other volunteers always complain how shut out they are by language. Firat managed to get his passport back and not be charged with terrorism. He arrived in Rojava a few months before me and went back to his Suikast80unit. Heval Firat encouraged me to come, though I was not at the fatefully infiltrated meeting where all the potential was discovered, charged and shook up to step down.
The number 500 is very small. Embarrassing even; the M.L.K.P. is a disciplined Turkish communist group who has taken on over 100 Shahids81. They have a deep alliance with the Party. But my structure has sent me to make the same deal. Can Rojava hold out long enough to export revolution? Can volunteers survive long enough to return to fight in the West? These are the questions I must answer. And while I’m away French police will make my mother very upset and afraid. They will basically terrorize her. Besides from Firat the Anarchist82 and Piling, the Tiger; there were several other French of note who prepared to cross into Rojava or were already inside. We know them only by their assigned Kurdish names. Heval Serhat was a lawyer and a petite aristocrat. Proudly French he prepared for adventure not revolution. He was there to kill Daesh-ISIS and avenge his terrorized homeland. France had over all endured the most of Daesh terror.
They sure underestimated what effect these well-choreographed executions would have on the hyper-plugged-in West. If anything, it got them invaded with greater speed.
Serhat was not named Serhat yet, nor was he even trying to join the Y.P.G. He was not a leftist and was hoping to link up with a famous Spanish fascist who had made a name for himself in Sinjar with the YBS. Unlike the YPG, he wouldn’t have to deal with all the ideological bullshit he was told. Serhat was a dandy; handsome and conservative. The struggle of his life before he got to the killing fields may have been the challenge of law school examinations. Some women may have broken his heart once.
A stranger to military or Islamist danger, Sher was “a Parisian waiter with socialist family values”. He had less qualms with the left being a leftist and was eager to join the YPG. His English was almost non-existent as was his Arabic and Kurdish, but he was eager to battle ISIS. Sher was a communist but not in any party. He had fired a rifle before and assumed he proved to be a good enough shot.
Neither Heval Sher nor Heval Serhat were eager to battle the Turks. They were aware that they were coming in on the tail end of the counter-ISIS operation. Raqqa, Mosul and the rest would all fall one after another by the wintertime. And after that all acknowledged the Americans would abandon its Kurdish and Shiite allies. The Turks would then move in to crush the revolution in Rojava and kill anything in their path. These were the discussed eventualities.
This was going to be the last time volunteers could get in easily, and fight ISIS, as they would be finished soon and the border sealed up for a time.
PILING
“After the struggle for Der Ez Zore and Raqqa, everyone will be fighting against Turkey.” What made the period of our deployment most uncertain was a combination of factors. First, ISIS was annihilated in Raqqa and on the run in Deir Ez-Zor. Second, the Russian Syrian-backed army and the Y.P.G. were racing on either side of the Euphrates River to seize more territory. So far most of the largest river cities were in the hands of the Syrian Regime and most of the oil was in our hands. Tension was building, sometimes erupting into firefights; since no one realistically believes the Assad Regime will tolerate Federal Rojava. At the same time, Türkiye is ready to attack Afrin Canton at any time, seizing the Western most Canton before we can fight our way through Syrian Jihadists in Al Qaeda to close the gap. And everyone knows our U.S. allies will abandon us as soon as ISIS is vanquished. Thirdly, the impending Kurdish referendum will provoke the Iraqi Army to seize border crossings in Sinjar and Northwest of Dokuk, making betting people and supplies into Rojava even harder.
The biggest uncertainty is what will happen when ISIS is inevitably defeated. But it’s not that uncertain really. Turkey, the second largest military in N.A.T.O. will immediately attack us and try and crush the revolution. Any of us are still here to face them. We will all most likely be killed. C’est la vie. This is the risk of real change. This is the Resistance of our time, so we say. The historic event that will shape the movement for real change for the next thousand years.
“Only a full coward would loudly profess these coffee house revolutionary views, these most noble of aspirations for the brotherhood of all mankind; then, when pressed to relinquish the luxury and safety of the West! They turn their back on defending a real revolution!”
Not I comrade, not I, No Pasdaran! “These Turkish bastards will not pass.”
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 