“The order to evacuate Erbil was given just an hour ago. But we evidently have ignored it.” My Kalashnikov, out from the trunk of my car, lies on the bar. A sense of grim theatre.
How many Cheta (bandits) (“Deash”) are advancing, closing in form the West on the “world’s longest continually inhabited City”? Could be several thousand, the satellite pictures suggest.
We are at the precipice of civilization. At a hotel roof bar in the world’s oldest, continuously inhabited city. Just me, a good looking shall we call it “Dutch journalist?” My new friend and associate, “Abu Hamza”, is a Kurdish patriot from the City of Kirkuk. “Never turn down a fight city”. Now in the hands of the PUK faction of Kurds, but for how long? It has a lot of oil. Also, with us, the last remaining waiter; perhaps a plant from The Party, chain smoking and watching the telescreen nervously. I hold an important book, well more of a rhetorical report on ‘capitalist modernity’. The title, the Kurds seems to change the title all the time; the Defenses, the Prison Writings; now the latest edition from Suly; “The Rise of the Middle East Confederation.”
“Total chaos tonight,” says Abu Hamza1. Whose actual name is Alacan. A sullen serious Kurd in his mid-twenties.
Just outside the city, to the Southwest, in the darkness are gathering hordes. Bearded men in black hoods, capable of unlimited violence. Many thousands of them. Actually? allegedly? Who knows? Not coalition military intelligence. With belt fed machine guns mounted on pickup trucks and ferociously sharp blades. The horde is at the gates. “Daesh”, “ISIS” is here. The city is understandably in total panic. Tens of Thousands have already fled for the mountains.
It is called “Arbil, or Erbil” by the Arabs and “Hewler” by the Kurds. The citadel is looped by ring roads. And thus, from the air it looks like a target. Newly paved, well-lit highways link hotels to malls to mosques to shopping centers. This is a city on the very edge of oblivion. Each tower, each pylon, each bolt, each cocktail; 6,000 years of human civilization brought to the full hilt. To the Maximum.
The alleged defense of the city will be managed by three factions of Kurdish militia. Two from the Peshmerga; the KDP who control the city and the the PUK several hundred trucked in from Sulaymaniyah. Some number, a few hundred PKK stay behinds will dig in for some guerrilla style hit and run and hold out as they do with little regard for their own safety.
Some number of CIA, how many who know, will involve themselves with directing air strikes around using the hotels as sniper points, and fighting ring by ring. The last point of defense will be the Citadel at the center.
The CIA is coordinating with the KDP and PUK, although many have fled. PUK has just arrived. The PKK is coordinating with the PUK, as they typically do, but not the KDP.
On the second innermost highway ring, of the 1,000 Meter Road, atop the Dedeman Hotel. Here we find a mixed-race European Justine. Her last name is slightly different on several official documents. It’s a little hard to pronounce. She sits for twilight libation. “If the defenses don’t hold and the air strikes don’t materialize, it’s gonna be a real dry town fast.”
“A contextual report on the Crisis in Greater Kurdistan.” From Case Officer Justine Tomas Falafarian to her colleagues in the Kurdistan Workers Party. On the eve of the battle for Erbil.
ABU HAMZA
The temperature went over 114 degrees today in Erbil City Streets. I am on the roof of a newly erected brutalist slab housing tower on the One Thousand Meter Ring Road to the southeast of Hewler. I took a little break. To watch the last lights of the sun dip below the low range to the West of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city. The whole roof is lit up in white lights. I will continue the broadcast. Any hour now we’ll be going over the border into what’s left of Syria. Into Rojava. Into a Revolution inside a grisly Civil war whose outcome is very much still up in the air. If Erbil falls tonight, sooner than later hopefully.
Abu Hamza looks a little, shall we say, a real fucking dower. Probably calculating just how indefensible the city is, based on how many Peshmerga militia have fled, or will soon flee.
JUSTINE TOMAS FALAFARIAN
“When you open your paper, turn on your TV, or boot up your smartphone and attempt to understand what is happening; you are already tuned into people paid well to validate a view you already had!”
One such view is that there is a war going on between Islam and the mainly Christian Eastern & Western Bloc that affects China too. Both Russia and the United States have been poorly managing Wahhabi-Salafist terror in their countries since long before the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991. The United States by funding it and Russia by committing war crimes against whoever deploys it against them or their interests. China has been battling Islamic separatists that wish to section off 1/5 of its country to the Northwest in Xinjiang province. Perhaps what you tune into tells you it’s all some massive clash of civilizations. This ridiculous idea was popularized by Samuel Huntington in 1992. Other writers and pundits declare the events all part of a long-running proxy war extending past when Francis Fukuyama ended history after the Cold War. If you’re deeply religious, and much of the human race is, you might periodically wonder if this is the end of time. As humans have wondered many, many times before. Neither the media nor the thought leaders nor your religious intuitions are paid by telling the truth. They are paid because you like how they interpret horrifying, unpredictable events for you. You subscribe to their interpretations because they assist you in rationalizing, wholly irrational human behavior, predatory government malfeasance, and social policies that enable a virtually endless war.
From your house of worship or via your TV screen you might try to rationalize what’s happening here in the killing fields of the Middle East through the prism of your respective prophet’s scriptures or favorite pundit’s words. The news is a nasty circular addiction. A part of religion is a repetitive act of denial. You almost must always deny that vast portions of the rest of your species are even loved or protected by God. This allows a dynamic whereby you systematically begin to not care as much about whole blocks of other humans, based on something you must have faith is real, but cannot be proved by science or reason. So, in many regards, any group of religious practitioners that equate Godly protection to a set of scriptures is always probably re-written and re-translated by a fallible man. It is implicit to accept the belief that your hands are washed off much of humanity’s manifest suffering. But the wretched of the earth are statistically Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu in relatively equal proportions. But let’s look at the flood of violence from this phase of this longest war today. Let us try to be dispassionate! Objective and rational, without losing our solidarity or our souls.
I can only assure you on the political science and international development level it is wholly rational what is happening in the world today. Outside of wars for diminishing resources, prophetic revelations, and clashing civilizations. It is the product of high-level planning and an absence of low-level care. We might extend that to the human tragedy generally and the Middle East Highly specifically.
“The steak is just as tender in New York, London, Geneva, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Beijing, Shanghai, St. Petersburg, and Moscow!”
The politicians in these places and those who manage them live in a similar style of home. People who own energy companies, big financial firms, manage banks, own arms, or information tech companies; their mansions and yachts have similar styles and elite luxury amenities. The suits that their businessmen wear is of similar styles and fine materials. The sports cars their kids drive is all around the same speeds, and costs since luxury items are all price fixed. The women for sale in all three power blocks have the same price tags and services for sale.
Thank G-d the “Cold War” is supposedly over because, for a cold war, a kind of hot series of medium-scale wars, civil wars, and highly bloody armed events occurred in almost every single country on earth between 1945 and 1991. Although most respective national histories are total propaganda by omission, it has been agreed in the West that Communism was soundly disproven and defeated and of course, the West allegedly ended history and “won.” But the Pax American of 1989 to 2001 was short-lived. We are supposedly all very democratic in the West.We have Republican or Parliamentary governments with generally only two major opposing parties and free-market economies. The Russians supposedly are that thing called Democracy as well. After all the looting that happened in the gangland 90s under the Shock Doctrines. Nigeria will tell you it is a democracy and so will a lot of other people. It is hard to find a Kurdish political party without the word Democracy in it. The absolute most war town, brutal, depraved place on earth is called the Democratic Republic of Congo.
We all have highly Managed-Democracies. Scripted even. They are managed differently in Russia than in the West. Also, generally with two parties of angry, loud ambitious lawyers, technocrats and oligarchs trying their hands at populism. In European social democracies, after looting the entire earth, they raised taxes and funded social services. Well certainly in Russia with only one relevant Party Yedinaya Rossiya (United Russia), democracy is slightly easier to implement. In Russia, the Communist Party is still the second-biggest party. Anyone effectively opposing United Russia or even writing about it in a negative way is promptly killed. Its corruption is referred to as the “party of crooks and thieves.” But most Russians agree that Vladimir Putin has restored security and dignity to Russia. America is a back-and-forth two-party state, and Russia is a multiple-party, one-party state. Designer consumer goods are readily available in both places. Russians as the losers of the Cold War are demographically poorer than Americans, but Russians have higher rates of university graduation and literacy. Both have pretty enormous domestic reserves of fossil fuels. This is why their ferocious Middle Eastern proxy war cannot be just about oil at all.
China has a strong one-party state, and it is run by the Communist Party. Its impressive economic growth since embracing State Capitalism in 1986 has propelled it to be a clear contender to Western Hegemony. China is disinterested in both military interventions and experiments in the Middle East. All three powers have increasing energy needs that America and Russia can meet within their borders and China cannot, who therefore has elected to colonize every country in Africa. However, energy resources; oil and natural gas, are the engines of both war and development.
America in 2017 has willing proxies in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. Its base for all Central Command, Military operations is in Qatar. The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, as some may recall. It mostly withdrew in 2011 but returned to contain ISIS in 2014. Saudi Arabia and all the Gulf States are Western oil clients, but all of them have intrinsic ties to the propagation of radical Islam.
Russia has a long-term client relationship with Syria and its only Mediterranean naval base there. Along with Crimea which it annexed in 2014 on the black sea, this is one of only two warm-water ports. The key Russian regional ally is Iran. Iran because of the American invasion of Iraq controls everything in Iraq that is not Iraqi Kurdistan, the Sunni Triangle, and the remains of the ISIS-held areas (Ar Raqqah, Anbar, Al-Hawijja, Deir-Ez-Zor). Most people here call them Daesh, the pejorative using the acronym.
For over 2/3rds of humanity, the very events critical to their respective, overlapping, and at times contradictory faiths took place in Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. For followers of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha’i, and numerous sub-sects of each, this is where their very prophets were all born, raised, and communicated with the source. From the very moment, according to their own religious texts, that the Israelites arrived out of Egypt there has never, except for several long authoritarian periods of Islamic Caliphate rule, been one even year of continuous peace. The Crusades were a several hundred-year series of barbaric attempts to establish a genocidal, white supremacist Roman Catholic foothold in an area only slightly larger than modern Israel. When not seeking to expand Islam into ¼ of the earth or repulsing Christian incursions; the Abbasids, the Umayyads, and the Ottomans were fighting constant wars with Mongol hordes, each other, or the long-running Sunni v. Shia wars.
There is nothing that can be written academically or rhetorically, presented on any medium to give the West or the East a new conscience. It is now a simple matter of public record that the developed world has accepted that the only obligations it has to the maldeveloped world is periodic mitigation. Famines, wars, floods, and disease epidemics are to be poorly managed by direct aid. Multilateral efforts through the United Nations are to be the extent of collaboration. NGOs will proliferate as donor trends determine. Regular military intervention will remove or shore up state systems intrinsically hostile to any of the three centers of global power; named Washington, Moscow and Beijing.
The World Wars and Cold War’s brought humanity closer than it ever has come to total self-destruction. But there was nothing particularly stable about the Pax-Americana from 1991 to 2001. The Russian and Chinese embrace of free-market capitalism has not altered in the slightest way how they maneuver as states toward their citizens and world. Albeit with fewer disasters, periods of social engineering. There is nothing particularly comforting about the Chinese hegemony when it fully arrives.
Consistent for nearly 100 years has been the Middle Eastern theater of a war that changes locations, ideologies, factions, and names. But it is all in fact a singular ongoing war.
If we accept the validity of real politics being intrinsically hostile and equity in the international order; if we excuse every type of growing human rights violation as explained in the national interest; the center cannot hold. The earth has only so much capacity for economic pillage. The weapons of war are exponentially more destructive. The exodus toward the West is overwhelming. We cannot prove broad conspiracy, nor do we have to. We cannot confirm or deny that something in human nature is self-interested, violent, and cruel. But we can truly verify a coherent, consistent willingness for wealthy nations to prey on the developing ones and keep them deliberately dependent and maldeveloped.
The Middle East has been in flames since 1919, and it is irresponsible to pretend that it has something to do with civilization, religion, or cultural clashes. It fundamentally has to do with two forces pushing from the East and the West toward an energy resource. But that is simplistic since both the United States and Russia have some of the largest proven reserves under their own territory. A Middle Eastern market for the weapons needed for constant warfare is a vital aspect. Both the Western and Eastern Blocs are seeking to control the oil in the ground and sell the dozens of Middle Eastern players’ advanced and simple tools for defense but mostly more killing. The various holy sites for the numerous religious believers convolute the basic thesis but are the third pillar of the equation. Were there no oil, there would be no willingness to arm so many opposing players. Observe Somalia where Muslims are in a desert and no Western powers really care until high-profile piracy occurs.
Were there no arms racing there could only be very small wars. Without political actors in Moscow as well as Washington, London and Berlin there could not be such a cauldron of bloodshed. There have been countless stated rationales for intervention, proxy arming, and invasion. It is nearly impossible to convince the democracies they ever did anything to escalate this. The war with the Islamic State has become a focal point, almost an obsession for everyone, but it is the latest manifestation of a long-running problem.
Before there was ever such a thing as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; the usual pundits and politicians screamed Cold War. Then East and West heavily armed everyone. Israel then tripled its landmass, Syria became the Russian proxy, and Egypt changed opportunistically sides. Next, they screamed about the containment of the Iranian Revolution rather than the West-armed Saddam Hussain. A gruesome eight-year war later Iraq genocided the Kurds. During this period to give the USSR their own Vietnam, the Saudis, Pakistanis, and Americans created Al-Qaeda and turned then Communist Afghanistan into the ungovernable Islamist warzone it is today. Then Saddam annexed Kuwait, and the West invaded. Several atrocities against Shi’a and Kurds later he remained in power. The pundits screamed loudest after September 11th, 2001, and the Global War on Terror began. Russian atrocities in Chechnya in the 1990s where one in four or seven Chechens was killed were replied to with the 2002 Beslan and 2004 Ord Nost Hostage crisis. Hundreds of innocent Russian hostages died in both events. An estimated 240,000 people had died in Chechnya in two wars that leveled the separatist state. Most regimes including Israel saw waves of protest in 2011 over domestic grievances and inequality during the Arab Spring. Virtually all regimes besides Tunisia quelled the uprisings. Civil War broke out in Libya and Syria. By 2014 Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria were all in total unrest, ashes, and anarchy. The corrupt military dictatorship of Egypt had been overthrown, then restored with U.S. intervention. Saudi Arabia and Iran were fighting proxy wars all over the region.
ABU HAMZA
“Turkey has clearly logistically enabled the creation of a Sunni-oriented, Wahhabi Salafist ultra-fundamentalist Jihadist entity which took the world by complete surprise. Saudi Arabia has long provided it with a hateful Sunni version of Islam. Qatari actors gave their sophisticated propaganda and branding. Pakistani intelligence coordinated it as they had in Yemen and Afghanistan2.”
Then, the so-called “Islamic State” took dozens of Syrian and Iraqi cities including Mosul, which had come dangerously close to taking Baghdad, before being turned back by Iranian coordinated militias and Kurdish Democratic Confederalists. The Peshmerga and the Iraqi military had fled in varying ways exposing civilians to atrocity. But allegedly quite a lot of these Sunni tribes people liked living under the Islamic State’s brand of non-state governance! It validated their identity; it gave them something big and powerful to believe in. But now they are near the brink of annihilation. It is actually not important to indict who thought up the Islamic State, and who planned it. Some say the Gulf States, some say Iran, Israel, and the West. The evidence though is clear that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar all fueled its development, and Pakistan has the only intelligence service capable of working out the variables. It is fucking childlike to believe it was created by Islamists and Ba’athist officers in U.S. custody.
It can be difficult to figure out what’s happening “out here in the Middle East”. It can become an abstraction of alien cultures, conflicts, and ethnic configurations that are easily blurred to an uncaring or untrained eye. It is hard to get your head around how the alleged cradle of human civilization became such an everlasting intractable bloodbath. Perhaps it is only the responsibility of the Western audience to know what is happening because the collateral of the carnage is spilling over into their European and American cities. No one will perhaps admit that, but yes. And it is also important to render the Middle East more human because the weapons distributed here are from the West or Russia. The oil being pumped is being bought and sold by Western or Russian firms. Most people living in the West don’t actually know what Kurdistan is, but that doesn’t say so much as most people in the West don’t know where a lot of things are. I would go so far as to say the majority don’t care.
Most probably won’t admit that they didn’t know that the Kurdish ethnic group existed until 2014. It was not until various pundits made it clear “the Kurds” were actively fighting the Islamic State did anyone ever hear about things like the Peshmerga, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), or about Kurds in general. The perversity and violence of ISIS kept it in the headlines for the past three years and the Kurdish issue has increasingly been at the forefront of understating geopolitics in the region.
Particularly because Iraqi Kurdistan, administered by the Kurdish Regional Government as an autonomous area since 2003 is set to hold its next referendum vote for independence on September 27th, 2017. And it is sitting on top of the fifth-largest proven crude oil reserve on earth. No one should totally wash their hands of what happens in the Middle East because its conflicts are fought with Western and Russian weapons, paid for by American and Russian tax dollars. The companies pumping out the oil are largely Western or Russian-based firms.
JUSTINE
There are in fact a lot of players, but all of them fall into four big tents; Western Allies led by the United States Military and Coalition forces. Russian Allies most prominently Syria and Iran. Gulf Sunni Client States claim they are Western Allies but can be linked to the Islamic State through one or two acts of deductive reasoning. And the 40 million Kurds spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The Kurds, who are the world’s largest stateless people are seeking some viable means to safeguard their long-abused community and of course, get rich off the oil under their Iraqi territory.
“I plan to be very repetitive with names and places that matter Heval!”
Or the places that have more than one name so the reader can try and learn them. There are a lot of overlapping players, a lot of acronyms, national interests, international interests, and underlying religious and ethnic antagonisms that go back thousands of years. There is a very long history of desert prophecy. This is certainly the land of Zoroaster, Abraham, Bab & Bahaullah (Iran); Moses (Egypt), Jesus (Israel/Palestine), and Muhammed (Saudi Arabia). Well documented and repetitive ethnic killing is the reality of life here for over 4,000 years punctuated by foreign occupations, colonies, and Islamic empires. Devastating foreign invasions on behalf of Mongolia and Europe altered the entire composition of the region; culturally, politically, and genetically. There is deep-rooted tribalism which has to be understood as a means of both loyalty and social organization. There are monarchies created by Europeans to crown their favored Bedouins as oil clients. There was the re-birth of the Jewish State for the third time in three thousand years. There was the re-birth of the revolutionary Shi’a State in Iran which carries a similar sense of Messianic optimism and zealous indoctrination to preserve for Shi’a what the Jewish one does for Jews. There is absolutely a more recent history since 1947 of several large and also small wars and protracted atrocities. Such as those experienced by the Palestinians at the hands of almost everyone in the region. You could rightfully say with a straight face that since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1919; there has been a constant war playing out inside every single country in the region.
The Western Media’s linguistic and cultural detachment from these antagonistic protagonists borders on being crude Orientalism. An anti-Islamism mixed with a thirst for covering and sensationalizing bloodshed. The fact that suicide bombs are regularly going off in Western cities has made everything more immediate, more visceral. But it is undeniable now that some of the biggest beneficiaries of being Western petrol-colony clients (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman) can be linked to funding and supporting Wahhabi Salafist doctrines when not being caught outright funding the Islamic State. Frankly, enduring miserable heat doesn’t help anything. While obsessing, that is the word I would use; obsessing about the regions 5 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians of Greater Israel, West Bank and Gaza take up a lot of printed word on the subject. The enduring issue, the issue that everyone needs to become more fluent in, is the question of Kurdistan.
Beyond the wars, the ceaseless violence and the conservative, most intolerant, male-dominated nature of Middle Eastern society in general; and Arab, Kurdish and Persian society in particular. All anthropological and political variants are made worse by what I would call claustrophobia. A feeling of being trapped in small spaces disguised as holy lands with nowhere to really go. Or fear of impending genocide, which affects all the players out here, and there are many. As I did not write this article for academics, let me paint with broad brushstrokes a paragraph on demographics.
ABU HAMZA
There are 35-40 million Kurds mostly spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. They are mostly Sunni Muslims., There are two primary types of Muslims; Sunni and Shi’a which differ in a range of practices and beliefs but are mostly divided over who was the rightful successor of the Prophet Muhamad. The Shi’a declared it was Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali and have been historically persecuted by the Sunni caliphates and rulers. Sunni Islam, which is the majority sectarian faction of global Islam (say 70-90%) Shi’ism is the smaller (say 10-20%) faction of the Ummah or Global Muslim community which is about 1/3 of humanity.
Kurds are also the world’s largest stateless people. Linguistically, culturally, spiritually, and often militarily Kurds are a great deal like Persians.
The nation of Iran has been a Revolutionary Shiite Islamic State since 1979, and is about 65% Persian, or say 50% of its 80 million people. There are also 9-10 million Kurds living there. While they are certainly not free from Iranian Sharia law; they are generally better treated than everywhere else in their historic lands of settlement. In Iraq, a genocide called Anfal happened in 1988 which brutally killed 180,000 Kurds. In Turkey Kurds and Turks have been in an open civil war since 1984. In Syria, Arabization campaigns and forced resettlement made them third-class citizens. Iran had an anti-Western, anti-Shah revolution in 1979. The United States promptly armed U.S. client Saddam Hussain to the teeth. Then sold guns secretly to Iran in the Iran-Contra Affair. While North Korea, Libya, and Israel all sold arms and secretly advised the Iranians. An 8-year war occurred in the style of World War I with trenches and poison gas where over a million people were killed. In the last days of the war, Saddam Hussain ordered Al-Anfal or the systematic killing of 180,000 Kurdish Iraqis.
The nation that used to be Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussain and the Ba’ath Party until 2003 when the US successfully “liberated” it.Only the Kurds would call it liberation as both the Shi’a and Sunni Iraqi Arabs both for the most part utterly hate the United States. The Shi’a have gained the most politically speaking. The Ba’ath party which was nominally Arab-Socialism but really a one-man dictatorship is also found in Syria. It is the political party of President Bashar al-Assad, who is an Alawite, but we will come back to that. It is certainly neither irrational nor poorly documented that historically everyone out here has at one point tried to annihilate each other. As most of the groups out here have at one point or are actively today trying to obliterate each other. None of this is helped by the obvious fact that the biggest Western powers & Russia cannot and will not allow control of natural resources under Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States to go unspoken for. Or be nationalized. Or be made inaccessible by virtually endless conflict.
Sometime around 0300-0400 there were mechanized sounds, the rumbling of the Hord, the incursion advancing. Followed by endless bombardments of death from above. The coalition airstrikes light up the wastelands. These Cheta scum, these ISIS bandits are blown apart just sixteen kilometers from the outermost ring road. Unbeknownst to them the city was virtually defenseless, all the Pesh Merga and most of the civilians had completely fled for their lives. If not for the aggressive Coalition airstrikes, Erbil would have fallen to Daesh in mere hours.
“I am a comrade and have always been a comrade, that is that. That is all.”
Absolument tout moun, 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 fields75, 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).
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.
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, like me.
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 Platformist76. 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.77 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 Suikast78unit. 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 Shahids79. 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 Anarchist80 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 this batch, 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, Pasdaran! “These Turkish bastards will not pass.”
The music blares away, and we huddled in the back of the long gun pick-up trucks bound for the river. The mop up operations of the several dozen Daesh hold out villages on the way to Hajin.
Music has always been an important tool in mobilizing the masses, particularly during times of war, with the Syrian conflict no exception. This piece looks at the musical propaganda of three of the Syrian Civil War’s major non-state actors, namely the Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat (‘Democratic Union Party’, usually referred to by its Kurdish acronym, PYD), Hezbollah, and Daesh. I share a few observations about the role music has played in the political sphere of conflict.
The Kurds do not have a nation-state, and one important element in the continuity of Kurdish identity is music. Since its inception, the PYD and its predecessor, the PKK, have been aware of the role of music as a tool to disseminate ideology. Both followers and militants themselves engage in musical production. Since the 1980s, PKK-linked radio and TV channels have broadcast the ideological discourse of the organization, usually through the medium of songs. Although folk music has historically been the dominant form, Western genres such as rap or rock are now also employed. These songs are also broadcast in Western media, often accompanied by images of female Kurdish militants holding weapons while singing. The organization consciously promotes this combination of imagery and music to differentiate itself from (male-dominated) Islamist groups.
In general, the songs employ a set of recognizable themes. The most common theme is praise for notions of Kurdishness. Lyrics are often derived from poems that emphasize Kurdish identity, written by traditional Kurdish poets. This theme is unique to the PYD among the groups fighting in the Syrian Civil War, with frequent reference made to the Kurdish homeland, which the PYD attests is under colonial occupation. Other themes crop up repeatedly, such as songs commemorating and celebrating the war’s individual battles. The PYD/PKK have many songs about their successful resistance in Kobanî/Ayn al-Arab, against Daesh’s assault on the town. Finally, Kurdish songs are also written in praise of the group’s ‘martyrs’, as well as the organization’s imprisoned spiritual leader, Abdullah Öcalan.
The Shi’a community in the Arab Middle East, which Hezbollah claims to represent, is another of the region’s ethno-religious groups without its own nation-state. In some respects, the use of music by Hezbollah resembles that of the PYD/PKK. A similar condition of ‘statelessness’ has put music at the forefront of identity formation for Hezbollah, yet there are also differences. First, a long-lasting ban on the Kurdish language in Turkey made singing in Kurdish highly political in itself for Kurds, but for Arab Shi’a, it is not the singing itself but the content that matters. Secondly, as a religious movement with important links to the Iranian regime, any music created by Hezbollah must fall within the limitations imposed by orthodox readings of Shi’a Islam and specifically the Iranian government’s understanding of it. These limitations include a ban on female voices in music and an opposition to Western musical forms.
Hezbollah songs emphasizing the bravery and courage of militants are also abundant. While this theme is shared between Hezbollah and the PYD, the heroic figure of Öcalan is replaced by Hassan Nasrallah in Hezbollah songs. Themes also differ between these two camps. Hezbollah composes more songs on the theme of martyrdom, a tradition with a long history in Shi’a Islam. Another important theme in Hezbollah songs is Palestine. Employing this theme, Hezbollah salutes its greatest victory, the 2006 war, and by comparing its enemies in the Syrian Civil War to an ‘army of Jews’, it increases its popularity in the Middle East, where anti-Israel rhetoric is widespread.
For Daesh, the most important type of music is the nasheed. In this musical form, a tambourine is the only instrument used, many references are made to the Qur’an, and solely male voices are allowed. Nasheeds are so common among both Shia and Sunni Islamist groups engaged in the war that they can be thought of as the soundtrack to the Syrian Civil War. One trait that separates nasheeds from the music of Hezbollah and the Kurdish movement is the plurality of the languages in which their lyrics are written: these include Arabic, Pashto, Bosnian, Kurdish, Flemish, German, and English. There are also various combinations of nasheeds with different musical genres. For example, Deso Dogg, a famous rapper from Germany who later joined Daesh and was killed in Syria, combined the classic nasheed form with hip hop.
The nasheeds of Daesh share themes with the previous examples, such as bravery, mourning, and eulogy. Like Hezbollah, Daesh also has songs directed against Israel; however, they focus more on the religious content of the lyrics and quote directly from the Qur’an. Almost all nasheeds makes reference to an Islamic golden age. Like the PYD songs that declare their goal of saving Kurdistan from colonialists, the nasheeds of Daesh declare their aim as restoring the ‘glorious past of Islam’. To overcome the faith-related limitations that define the musical forms, producers of Daesh songs have used various tactics, such as adding sounds of swords and guns to the music. Special attention is paid to the online circulation of music videos. As of 2019, Daesh has lost most of its physical presence in Syria, but before that, while both Hezbollah and the PYD had more representatives and institutions outside of Syria, Daesh’s network was relatively narrow. Thus, they used the Internet to reach and attract masses and disseminate their political views. Many platforms, including YouTube, where music videos are shared and open for comment, acted as forums for them.
Not all the musical battles of the Syrian Civil War are being fought by these three camps alone. Ibrahim Qashoush must be remembered in any discussion of the role of music in Syria. He was not bound to any political organization. Three days after he led crowds in Hama in singing ‘Yalla Erhal Ya Bashar’ (‘Get Out, Bashar’, addressed to the president of Syria) in July 2011, his body was found in the Asi River, his throat having been cut. His murder represents the first bullet fired in the battle of the music of the Syrian Civil War, but it was not to be the last.108
The once-bustling village lay in ruins, its streets empty and silent save for the echoes of distant gunfire. It was here, amidst the crumbling buildings and deserted homes, that Ciya, a Scottish fighter with the YPG, and his men prepared for an intense close-quarters battle. The village, strategically important for both the YPG and ISIS, had become a focal point in the ongoing conflict.
Ciya and his tabor, seasoned fighters who had seen their share of brutal engagements, had established a defensive position in a two-story building at the edge of the village. The structure, though dilapidated, offered a commanding view of the surrounding area and provided a relatively secure spot for their stand. The second-floor landing became their last line of defense. The building was surrounded by debris—collapsed walls, shattered windows, and overturned vehicles. The silence of the village was deceptive, as the calm was frequently broken by the distant sounds of ISIS movements and sporadic gunfire. The village’s eerie quiet only heightened the tension as Ciya and his men awaited the inevitable assault.
As dusk fell, the quiet was shattered by the thunderous roar of ISIS fighters storming the village. Ciya, standing on the second-floor landing, peered through a shattered window, his eyes scanning the darkening landscape. The ISIS forces, numbering in the dozens, approached with a coordinated push, their shouts and commands piercing the silence.
“Hold your positions!” Ciya barked to his men, who were already in position, their weapons trained on the advancing enemy. “We need to make every shot count.”
The first wave of ISIS fighters surged forward, their rifles blazing as they attempted to breach the building. The YPG defenders, entrenched and resolute, returned fire with deadly precision. The close-quarters nature of the fight meant that every corner, every narrow passageway, became a potential battleground. Ciya’s experience and leadership shone through in the chaos. He moved swiftly between his men, offering encouragement and tactical guidance. The defenders on the second floor engaged the enemy with a mix of assault rifles, grenades, and improvised weapons. The close confines of the building, combined with the fighters’ skill, allowed them to inflict heavy casualties on the advancing ISIS forces.
For hours, the battle raged on. The ISIS fighters, determined to take the building, pressed their attack with relentless ferocity. They attempted to breach the building using explosives and heavy machine guns, but Ciya and his men were prepared. They fought tenaciously, using the building’s layout to their advantage and engaging in brutal, close-quarters combat.
Ciya’s leadership was evident as he coordinated his team’s efforts. He directed fire to key entry points, organized counterattacks, and provided covering fire as his men repositioned. The defenders’ discipline and teamwork allowed them to hold off numerous assaults, but the fight was far from easy.
The building’s interior was a maze of narrow hallways and rooms, each one turning into a battleground. The second-floor landing, though still relatively secure, was under constant threat. The walls were pockmarked with bullet holes, and the floor was littered with spent shells and fragments of shattered glass.
Despite the relentless assault, Ciya and his team managed to repel each wave of attackers. They utilized every bit of cover available, making use of the building’s structural weaknesses to create defensive advantages. Each member of the team performed with remarkable skill, turning the abandoned village into a fortress of resistance.
As night deepened, the battle showed no signs of abating. The ISIS fighters, having taken heavy losses, seemed to grow more desperate. Ciya’s men, though exhausted, remained determined. Their unity and resolve were their greatest assets! Realizing the need for decisive action, Ciya ordered a series of well-coordinated counterattacks. They used the remaining grenades and explosive devices to create choke points and disrupt the enemy’s advances. The close-quarters nature of the battle meant that every move was critical, and Ciya’s tactical acumen played a crucial role in the defenders’ ability to hold their ground. After eight grueling hours of intense combat, the tide began to turn. The ISIS fighters, their ranks severely depleted and their morale waning, started to pull back. The defenders, though battered and weary, pressed their advantage, launching a final, aggressive push that forced the remaining attackers to retreat.
As dawn broke over the abandoned village, Ciya and his men emerged from the building, their faces etched with exhaustion but also with a profound sense of achievement. The village, now eerily silent, bore the scars of the night’s fierce battle. The defenders had successfully held their position, repelling a determined and numerically superior enemy.
Ciya surveyed the battlefield with a mixture of relief and pride. The cost of the battle had been high, but the determination and bravery of his team had turned the tide. The abandoned village, once a potential stronghold for ISIS, had been reclaimed through the courage and resilience of the YPG fighters.
As the sun rose over the battered landscape, Ciya and his men began to assess the damage and tend to their wounded. The battle had been a testament to their skill and endurance, a fierce struggle that had tested their limits but ultimately reaffirmed their commitment to their cause. In the aftermath of the battle, the abandoned village stood as a stark reminder of the harsh realities of war and the unwavering resolve of those who fought to protect their land and their people.
Kobani—also known as Ayn al-Arab—lies to the east of the Euphrates River.
The town had grown up around a 1912 train station built as a stop on the Ottoman Empire’s Berlin-to-Baghdad railway. The city was largely home to Armenians and Kurds and had a population of about 45,000 when Syria’s civil war began in 2011.
In July 2012, Kurdish forces in the Y.P.G./Y.P.J./P.K.K. took over protection of the city of Kobani and all the districts around it.
“Kobani holds a strategic position on the border with Turkey. From Kobani in the West, past Sinjar and toward Erbil in the East, lies a corridor of oil pipelines and refineries. ISIS was tapping the oil for more than $2 million per day in revenue. Control of Kobani would help solidify ISIS control of Syria’s oil fields. Locking down that revenue was part of the goal for creating the ISIS caliphate Under ISIS control, Kobani would also be a haven for recruits going south to fight in Iraq. Already over 50,000 had crossed in. The Battle of Kobani, also known as the Siege of Kobani, stands as a pivotal moment in the ongoing struggle for Kurdish autonomy and the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). From the Kurdish perspective, it represents a testament to their resilience, determination, and unwavering commitment to defend their land against tyranny and extremism.”
Kobani, a predominantly Kurdish town in northern Syria, found itself thrust into the international spotlight in 2014 as ISIS militants launched a brutal assault on the city. What ensued was a grueling battle that would come to symbolize the broader struggle against ISIS and the Kurdish people’s fight for survival.
On Sept. 16, ISIS forces seized a key bridge over the Euphrates. A drive with tanks and artillery captured small villages and brought ISIS to within 10 kilometers of Kobani by Sept. 20. Soon artillery fire was falling into the city. Turkey counted 130,000 Syrian Kurdish refugees streaming across the border four days later.
Up to 4,000 ISIS fighters were advancing in parts of the city. Countering them was a determined force of fighters, starting with groups of Syrian Kurds. They were soon joined by Peshmerga, official Kurdish forces of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, and numerous other groups. Kobani’s defenders were in trouble, though. ISIS took an important hill from the YPG—Kurdish militia in Syria—on Sept. 26. The momentum could overwhelm the city. Brazen ISIS forces behaved like an army moving freely, out in the open on the roads and arid terrain.
For the Kurds, Kobani was more than just a strategic location; it was a symbol of their identity and aspirations for self-determination. The town served as a beacon of hope for Kurds everywhere, a bastion of resistance against forces bent on eradicating their culture and way of life. As ISIS forces advanced, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) rallied to defend Kobani, drawing on their guerrilla warfare tactics and fierce determination. Despite being outnumbered and outgunned, they refused to yield, vowing to fight to the last breath to protect their homeland.
The battle for Kobani was characterized by intense urban warfare, with ISIS militants employing tactics of terror and brutality in their attempts to capture the city. However, the Kurds, bolstered by their strong sense of solidarity and unity, stood firm, repelling wave after wave of attacks.
The resilience of the Kurdish fighters drew widespread admiration and support from around the world, with volunteers flocking to join the ranks of the YPG and YPJ. Kurdish forces received crucial air support from the US-led coalition, which carried out airstrikes targeting ISIS positions and supply lines.
The battle for Kobani raged on for months, exacting a heavy toll on both sides. The city lay in ruins, its streets littered with the debris of war and the scars of conflict etched into its buildings. Yet, amidst the devastation, the spirit of the Kurdish people remained unbroken. Finally, after months of fierce fighting, the tide began to turn in favor of the Kurds. With the support of coalition airstrikes and reinforcements, they succeeded in driving ISIS militants out of Kobani, dealing a significant blow to the terrorist organization’s ambitions in the region.
The liberation of Kobani was a moment of triumph for the Kurdish people, a testament to their courage, resilience, and unwavering commitment to freedom. It was a victory not just for the residents of Kobani, but for Kurds everywhere who had long yearned for a homeland where they could live in peace and dignity. However, the battle for Kobani also came at a great cost. Thousands of lives were lost, and the city lay in ruins, its infrastructure devastated by the violence. The scars of war would take years to heal, and the memory of those who sacrificed their lives in defense of Kobani would never be forgotten. In the aftermath of the battle, the Kurds faced the daunting task of rebuilding their shattered city and reclaiming their lives. Despite the challenges that lay ahead, they remained steadfast in their determination to build a better future for themselves and future generations.
The Battle of Kobani serves as a powerful reminder of the Kurdish people’s resilience in the face of adversity and their unwavering commitment to freedom and justice. It is a chapter in their long and tumultuous history that will be remembered for generations to come, a testament to the indomitable spirit of a people who refuse to be silenced or oppressed.
***
The streets of Kobani were a labyrinth of destruction and defiance, where every corner held the echoes of a city once vibrant, now scarred by the relentless onslaught of war. Islamic State militants had laid siege to this Kurdish town for months, seeking to crush its spirit and claim it as their own. But the Kurds, fierce and determined, had refused to yield.
Amidst the rubble-strewn alleys and crumbling buildings, a small group of Kurdish fighters moved with calculated precision. They were led by Baran, a seasoned commander with weathered features that spoke of countless battles fought and survived. His eyes, steely and unwavering, scanned the horizon as he led his comrades towards a strategic position overlooking a key intersection. Suddenly, the crackle of gunfire erupted from a nearby building. Baran instinctively signaled his team to take cover, their movements fluid and practiced. Bullets whizzed overhead, kicking up debris and sending puffs of dust into the air. The staccato rhythm of AK-47s mingled with the shouts of militants, their voices laced with fanaticism and hatred.
“Keep it low! Return the fire!” Baran barks, his voice cutting through the chaos. His fighters responded with disciplined bursts of gunfire, aiming for the flashes of movement behind makeshift barricades. The air fills with the acrid scent of gunpowder as the skirmish intensifies.
Across the street, a group of Islamic State fighters sought to advance, using burnt-out vehicles and crumbling walls as cover. They moved with a deadly efficiency, their intent clear: to overrun the Kurdish position and tighten the noose around their defenses.
Baran gritted his teeth, his mind racing with tactics honed through years of guerrilla warfare. He gestured to one of his fighters, a young woman named Leyla, her braided hair peeking out from under a worn-out keffiyeh. “Leyla, cover our flank. Hassan, suppress their fire!”
Without hesitation, Leyla sprinted towards a nearby building, her movements swift and silent. She took up position on the second floor, peering through a shattered window. Below, she could see the militants’ movements, their black flags fluttering in the wind like ominous shadows.
Taking careful aim, Leyla squeezed the trigger of her rifle, sending precise shots towards the advancing fighters. One militant fell with a cry, clutching his leg in agony. The others scrambled for cover, momentarily disrupted by the sudden onslaught from an unexpected angle. Meanwhile, Hassan unleashed a torrent of bullets towards the militants’ position, forcing them to keep their heads down and buy precious moments for his comrades to reposition and regroup. But the lull in the gunfire was short-lived. With a renewed fervor, the Islamic State fighters launched a counterattack. They surged forward, shouting battle cries that reverberated through the war-torn streets. Baran’s team braced themselves, their hearts pounding with a mixture of adrenaline and determination.
The battle became a deadly dance of tactics and tenacity, each side pushing the other to the brink of exhaustion. The clatter of gunfire mingled with the distant rumble of artillery, a constant reminder of the larger war raging beyond Kobani’s borders.
Baran gritted his teeth as he fired off rounds, his movements fluid and precise. His mind raced, calculating each move, and anticipating the enemy’s next maneuver. Sweat trickled down his brow, mixing with the dust and grime of battle.
Suddenly, a grenade sailed through the air, landing with a thud amidst Baran’s team. Without hesitation, he shouted a warning, diving for cover as the explosion ripped through the air with a deafening roar. Shrapnel sprayed across the street, sending shards of metal and concrete flying in all directions.
Miraculously, Baran and his fighters emerged unscathed, their ears ringing from the blast. They exchanged quick glances, wordlessly reaffirming their resolve to fight on. Around them, the battlefield lay in tatters—a testament to the ferocity of their resistance and the brutality of their adversaries.
As the smoke cleared and the echoes of gunfire faded into the distance, Baran surveyed the scene with a mix of weariness and grim satisfaction. The Islamic State fighters, their advance stalled and their ranks thinned, began to retreat under the cover of smoke and confusion.
“We hold this ground,” Baran declared, his voice firm despite the fatigue that weighed heavily upon him. His comrades nodded in silent agreement; their faces streaked with sweat and determination.
And so, amidst the ruins of Kobani, where the scars of battle ran deep and the wounds of war were still raw, the Kurdish fighters stood defiant. They had faced the onslaught of the Islamic State with courage and resilience, turning the tide of battle one bullet, one grenade, one hard-won victory at a time.
***
The Siege of Kobanî was launched by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant on 13 September 2014, to capture the Kobanî Canton and its main city of Kobanî (also known as Kobanê or Ayn al-Arab) in northern Syria, in the de facto autonomous region of Rojava. By 2nd October 2014, the Islamic State had succeeded in capturing 350 Kurdish villages and towns in the vicinity of Kobanê,generating a wave of some 300,000 Kurdish refugees, who fled across the border into Turkey‘s Şanlıurfa Province. By January 2015, this had risen to 400,000.The Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and some Free Syrian Army (FSA) factions (under the Euphrates Volcano joint operations room), Peshmerga of the Kurdistan Regional Government, and American and US-allied Arab militaries airstrikes began to mount a last-minute defense.
For the next 112 days the world watched as the Kurdish forces defended the city street by street-by-street block by block in horrific bloody street fighting. Waves upon waves of Daesh truck bombs blowing young men and women apart. It was believed that the outnumbered and outgunned Free Syrian Army, Peshmerga, Y.P.G. and Y.P.J. were doomed and would be quickly annihilated. The Islamic State advanced with precision and with incredible confidence. In several prongs they attacked Kobane City murdering everyone standing in their way. Some people put them naked in cages, then burned them alive. Some they gang raped, some they scalped, beheaded or others they burned alive in cages.
In the ISIS mythology anyone killed by a female fighter is denied the glory of martyrdom, so they savagely set on any female defenders they captured. In many ways, every horrific thing you might associate with the Syrian Civil War came from the Islamic State, or the Assad Regime and or the Russians. But the brutality Daesh is known for, they recorded it gleefully. They broadcast it freely. They made it sleek for replay in dark corners of the internet. And, on the screens of Western TV.
In a Report by American Air Force analyst Rebecca Grant:
“When the so-called Islamic State set its sights on Kobani, Syria, in mid-September 2014—encircling Kurdish fighters there—then-Secretary of State John Kerry warned that the city couldn’t be saved. As Turkish tank crews watched tensely from across the border, the US Air Force and coalition air power went into action, making supply drops and hitting surrounding ISIS forces with bombs dropped from B-1B bombers.
The 112-day siege proved to be the turning point in America’s commitment to fighting in Syria, and a battle lab for dynamic air and ground tactics.”
Mosul, Iraq, fell to ISIS in June 2014. Three months later, ISIS fighters were battling Iraqi forces less than 25 miles from Baghdad. The fall of either Baghdad or Damascus would have sent a theological signal to an even greater number of foreign volunteers to enlist. At the time of Kobane, it was widely understood by the intelligence community that over 50,000 foreign fighters had joined ISIS. Largely entering through Turkey.
US and coalition airpower intervened, releasing 1,200 weapons in strikes during August and September 2014.
“As you know, this has been an important week for the US and our coalition forces as we began air strikes in Syria,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Sept. 26. US and Arab allies carried out 43 air strikes into Syria, he reported.
The first US airstrikes near Kobani began on Sept. 27. Air Force F-15Es struck an ISIS command and control center; a typical target for that phase of the campaign. Also in action were aircraft from the carrier USS George H. W. Bush. For the next two weeks, coalition air strikes continued, but only in small doses. Coalition planners struggled to pinpoint suitable targets and to work with Kobani’s defenders. By Sept. 30, the Pentagon reported 76 airstrikes in Syria, mostly near Kobani.
Washington was in shock. The Intelligence Community and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper “acknowledged that they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” President Barack Obama told “60 Minutes” on Sept. 30, 2014.
Defending Kobani would take a direct US commitment to defeating ISIS in Syria. While US and coalition partners were pledged to chase ISIS out of Iraq, Syrian policy was another matter. Fighting for Kobani meant more intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, more air strikes, and forging a relationship with groups of Syrian Kurds as new partners on the ground.
“You can’t defend Kobani, Baghdad, Mosul, Erbil, and Sinjar,” as well as conduct strikes “against the Islamic State in places such as Raqqa, with a limited number of ISR orbits to collect necessary intelligence,” a senior Pentagon official told Kate Brannen of Foreign Policy on Oct. 7.
Although the coalition apportioned air strikes to the beleaguered town, pessimism prevailed. A total of 135 air strikes had been carried out on Kobani targets by Oct. 9. “The US has now struck Kobani more than any other target except the Mosul dam,” Jim Sciutto of CNN tweeted on Oct. 9, 2014.
Still, Washington wavered. The Obama administration had committed publicly and at the United Nations to pursuing ISIS through Iraq. What about Syria
“As horrific as it is to watch in real time what is happening in Kobani … you have to step back and understand the strategic objective,” Kerry said at a news conference in Washington with Philip Hammond, Britain’s foreign secretary.
“We are trying to deprive ISIS of the overall ability to wage [war], not just in Kobani but throughout Syria and into Iraq,” Kerry added.
“No Can Do” screamed Time magazine’s headline on the prospects of saving Kobani.
“The US has been restricted in its ability to battle ISIS for two reasons: it waited for months before taking action, and then—per Obama’s orders—it decided not to commit any US ground troops to the fight,” Mark Thompson wrote in Time on Oct. 9, 2014. Katherine Wilkens of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace called Kobani “A Kurdish Alamo.”
“In a coalition where most of Washington’s regional partners are primarily focused on regime change in Syria, the jihadist attack on Kobani offers a test case of whether the United States can get its partners to temporarily set aside their other priorities and act effectively against the Islamic State,” Wilkens wrote in an Oct. 10, 2014, piece.
NATO allies such as the Netherlands and Belgium were deploying forces to join the coalition, and France was already in the fight. For the time being, their parliaments had restricted air strikes to territory in Iraq only. Ultimately, Bahrain, Britain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE air forces participated alongside the US providing air support for Kobani.
Airpower was the main tool available. “Just to remind, there’s not going to be a US ground combat role here,” Rear Adm. John Kirby, Pentagon spokesman, said on Oct. 10, 2014. “I’m putting that out very clearly.”
As for airpower, some doubted its effectiveness, given the slipping situation.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen because, again, in the absence of any ground force there, it is going to be difficult just through airpower to prevent ISIS from potentially taking over the town,” then-Deputy National Security Advisor Tony Blinken told NBC News on Oct. 13.
Air strikes were, however, having an effect. The attacks quickly constricted the mobility of ISIS forces. “Before the air strikes happened, they pretty much had free rein,” admitted Kirby. “They don’t have that free rein anymore, because they know we’re watching from the air.”
ISIS forces got better at concealment, according to Kirby.
Two types of air strikes were underway. First was dynamic targeting of what Kirby called “mobile assets on the ground.” These included tanks, command posts, even trucks used in the oil smuggling. Deliberate, pre-planned targeting also went against “fixed targets, a headquarters building, command and control nodes, a finance center, oil refineries.” The idea was to prevent ISIS from consolidating its gains.
However, a sprinkling of strikes wasn’t going to be enough. ISIS forces and tanks advanced closer to the center of Kobani on Oct. 10. A spasm of suicide vehicle bombings followed as ISIS fighters tried to dislodge Kurdish strongpoints.
Both sides were now determined to prevail.
Saudi Arabia joined US fighters and bombers striking ISIS targets southwest of Kobani on Oct. 13.
“Rather than the bombing prompting a tactical retreat” by ISIS units, “they appear to have doubled down in their quest for Kobani,” observed Derek Flood, a journalist who was in Turkey on Oct. 15, 2014. As American air strikes rapidly increased in and around Kobani, ISIS fighters “ushered in reinforcements from their reservoir of recruits in al-Raqqa and Aleppo and ramped up their employment of vehicle-borne suicide bombers,” Flood wrote in the CTC Sentinel, West Point’s counterterrorism journal, in November 2014.
For ISIS, too, this was chosen ground. It clearly mattered to ISIS, Kirby said, “because they kept presenting themselves there and presenting targets.”
In fact, the air strikes put Kobani in the global spotlight. For the US and coalition partners, Kobani was on the verge of becoming a major failure.
Across the border, Turkish tanks lined up to keep a wary watch. Turkish civilians could see the fighting in Kobani from the town of Suruc on their side of the border.
ISIS fighters took over key checkpoints then a key outlying overlooking hill. And then drove the Kurdish defenders out of a key defensible school building. Defeat looks inevitable.
With Kobani nearly defeated, Washington made its move. NATO ally Turkey had entered the anti-ISIS coalition on Oct. 2. Now Turkey agreed to allow resupply to the Kurds to sustain the fight in Kobani. Washington placed its bet on airpower.
On Oct. 20, three USAF C-130s conducted multiple airdrops to resupply Kurdish forces, defending the city. In the airdrops were 24 tons of small arms and ammunition. The airdrops also included 10 tons of medical supplies. Kurdish authorities in Iraq provided the supplies, according to Central Command. As the operation progressed, Operation Inherent Resolve would log over 1.4 million pounds of supplies airdropped from August to December of 2014. From a strategic perspective, there was hope.
“For its campaign against Kobane, [ISIS] has converged en masse for a conventional attack upon a fixed geographic point,” observed Jill Sargent Russell of Kings College London. While ISIS “might momentarily hold an advantage against any concerted defense with effective fire support, they are weak and soft targets,” she pointed out in an Oct. 20, 2014, comment to Britain’s Daily Telegraph.
“Suddenly, the fight for this little-known town took on vast symbolic significance,” wrote Fred Kaplan in Slate on Oct. 31, 2014. “And if ISIS was telling the world that Kobani was a decisive battle along the path to the Islamic State’s victory, then Obama—who’d put American resources and credibility on the line—had little choice but to treat it as a decisive battle as well,” Kaplan assessed.
By early November, ISIS was failing to gain new ground. Four attempts to take a border crossing with Turkey had failed. ISIS called for reinforcements. So did the Kurdish fighters. Backed by steady US and coalition airpower, the Kurdish groups were securing their foothold in Kobani.
ISIS controlled about 60 percent of Kobani as of Nov. 5, 2014. It would prove to be their high-water mark.
The decision to assist Kobani marked a change in the US strategy in Syria. Now the US had to “deliver on helping develop a trained, moderate opposition in Syria that has the requisite leadership and military skills to actually go ahead and defend territory inside Syria,” as Kirby explained at the Pentagon.
What followed was two months of street-by-street fighting. For US airpower, the problem was that ISIS fighters had wrapped themselves around the city and what was left of its civilian population.
It was up to a combination of ISR and battlefield input from the Kurds to outline areas for strikes. As the force on the ground improved tactically, so did its use of airpower. Open supply lines from Turkey also had a significant effect.
US and coalition aircraft striking Kobani faced a long flight from deployed bases. They also had to fly past Syria’s air defenses. Syria’s integrated air defense system usually looked westward, toward Israel, and coalition aircraft operated in the East. Yet the threats were real.
American F-22s in-theater helped quarterback the strike packages. Aircraft such as B-1 bombers, F-15E and F-16 fighters, and others carried electronic warfare systems able to process and jam signals. The B-1s were especially good at dealing with electronic threats.
Dynamic targeting was sharpened during the siege of Kobani. Joint Tactical Air Controllers rarely deployed with the Kurds. Instead, they employed ISR to watch the fight. As targets developed, JTACS did collateral damage estimates and forwarded targeting. Sometimes cell phones were part of the process.
Lt. Gen. John W. Hesterman III, then-commander of US Air Forces Central Command, explained that the vast majority of dynamic targeting strikes were “well away from friendly troops in contact. And we use a multitude of sources to initially ID the enemy and communicate what we see. Then JTACS in operations centers do a collateral damage estimate and then we deconflict friendlies. And when that’s done, a senior officer clears the sortie.”
“You know, the average time for those strikes, by the way, is measured in minutes, not hours, or even halves of hours.”
By far the single largest amount of ordnance pounding ISIS targets in Kobani came from B-1 bombers, which dropped 1,700 precision guided weapons on Kobani during the siege.
“Bones” from the 9th Bomb Squadron at Dyess AFB, Texas, deployed to Qatar in July 2014 expecting six months of long combat overwatch flights to and from Afghanistan’s airspace. They had been used consistently since 2001 to loiter and drop bombs, provide overflights, or simply keep watch. Previously, in Afghanistan, the 9th Bomb Squadron’s B-1 crews found it could take four to five hours to develop and strike a target.
In 2013, they had dropped just 93 bombs in Afghanistan over six months.
At Kobani, the intensity of the fight ratcheted up. “It was a massive shift in rules of engagement,” said Lt. Col. Erick Lord, the 9th BS commander, to Military.com in a January 2018 interview.
In Kobani, “It was just go! Blow everything up,” Lord said.
“It was an urban environment, so there were a lot of buildings,” Maj. Charles Kilchrist told the website.
“We had jets there every single day for 24 hours a day. Along with the F-15E Strike Eagles,” he said.
An F-16 pilot described her missions over Kobani. Especially after night sorties, dawn would break over the deserted town. It looked “like a moonscape,” she said.
One ongoing concern was interference from Syria’s Air Force. This F-16 pilot appreciated how F-22s often just took care of air superiority and let the F-16s concentrate on air-to-groundwork.
Maintaining air patrols over Kobani meant six or more hours on station. Depending on what happened, fighters were often rerouted back into Iraq to refuel.
The F-15s and B-1s would tag each other, handing off targeting coordinates as they rotated in and out for the days-long watch.
“We were just bombing them back, and back, and back … to the West, and [ISIS] would try to sneak around to the South, and then we would see them, and … it was just a huge battle,” Kilchrist said.
On the ground, the arrival of Iraqi Kurd Peshmerga troops brought forces with experience in coordinating US air strikes.
“There were times we were bombing across the street, and as soon as the weapons were going off, they are charging into the rubble to take out what’s left and move forward that line of troops to the next block,” one B-1 pilot told Air Force Times. “It’s an amazing job the [Kurdish forces] did and how they are, more so than air- power, critical to victory in Kobani.”
The B-1s went Winchester—dropping their entire bomb load in one mission—a total of 31 times in the fight for Kobani. That was a credit to smooth air-ground coordination. Typically, crews would release weapons on individual targets throughout several hours.
“The more they [ISIS] try to act like an army … they just reinforce failure, and we kill them at a very great rate,” concluded Hesterman.
“They were very willing to impale themselves on that city,” one B-1 crew member told Air Force Times.
On Jan. 19, 2015, Kurdish YPG fighters stormed Mistanour Hill. Kobani was declared fully liberated about a week later.
The transcript continues:
“The “air strikes helped a lot. It helped when we had a reliable partner on the ground in there who could help us fine-tune those strikes,” Kirby told reporters at the Pentagon on Jan. 27.
Kobani was a significant defeat for ISIS. It lost personnel, territory, and its command-and-control safe haven. The ISIS plan to mass and exert military force over the city fell apart.
CNN reported ISIS fighters withdrew from Kobani because “we no longer had places to hold there,” an ISIS fighter said. “We were inside Ayn al-Arab and we occupied more than 70 percent, but the air strikes did not leave any building standing, they destroyed everything.” The targets even included motorcycles; he added.
Also in late January, Hagel announced the US would begin to train and arm Syrian opposition forces. The success of combining Kurd ground forces and coalition airpower at Kobani had proved the concept.
Then-USAF Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Welsh acknowledged that his service flew about 60 percent of the sorties in the air war against ISIS. However, he shrugged off the credit.
“The DOD approach is not to defeat ISIS from the air. The intent is to inhibit ISIS, to attrition ISIS, to slow ISIS down, to give the ground force time to be trained because the ground force will be required,” Welsh said in a State of the Air Force press conference on Jan. 15, 2015.
Holding Kobani was not the end of the ISIS fight. It took a huge acceleration of air strikes from 2015 through 2017 to secure Iraq and bottle up the worst of ISIS. The weapons release count for Operation Inherent Resolve reached 106,808 at the end of 2017.
However, at Kobani, airpower again stepped in as the workable option in a foreign policy crisis, with lives on the line and the world watching. As with Bosnia, Kosovo, and the early days of Afghanistan, allies found their airmen provided a way to fight.
Concluded one B-1 crewman: “I look forward to telling my grandkids that I got to help these people and to defend their homes.”
“On 26 January 2015, the YPG and its allies, backed by the continued US-led airstrikes, began to retake the city, driving ISIS into a steady retreat. The city of Kobanê was fully recaptured on 27 January; however, most of the remaining villages in the Kobanî Canton remained under ISIL control.The YPG and its allies then made rapid advances in rural Kobanî, with ISILS withdrawing 25 km from the city of Kobanî by 2 February.”
“By late April 2015, ISIS had lost almost all of the villages it had captured in the Canton but maintained control of a few dozen villages it seized in the northwestern part of the Raqqa Governorate. In late June 2015, ISS launched a new offensive against the city, killing at least 233 civilians, but were quickly driven back. The battle for Kobanî was considered a turning point in the war against Islamic State and the beginning of official collaboration between the United States of America, the single largest military force on earth and the Kurdistan Workers Party, considered a terrorist organization by Turkey, American and virtually every major country in NATO.”
“This was also the beginning of the PKK-American alliance lacking any other credible ground force to take on ISIS; a leading imperialist hegemon shortly after began training and funding one of the last important leftist guerrilla groups left standing after the cold war, as long as they could work under a front; and the name of that front become the “SYRIAN DEMOCRATIC FORCES.”
By the time the SDF had successfully rebuilt most of the City by December of 2024, the Turkish army was massing for the second battle of Kobani. This time there was no American air support.
In grim Birmingham, U.K. sometime in late of 2016, two British Hevals meet in a bleak coffee shop with no phones to say hello, goodbye, and hash out some final details for their upcoming deployment into Rojava.
“My government name is not relevant to you, Hevalin, as they say.” Havalin is the plural of Hevals, my man and multiple friends. Says Heval Erdal, a cheeky British Jew of left-wing leanings with many Kurdish friends. He sits with his old friend Ana Montgomery Campbell from Lewes, U.K. who later died a Martyr in the defense of Afrin Canton. The British pipeline begins in Birmingham. Actually, hundreds of ISIS Islamists had been recruited from Birmingham. Literally many hundreds.
“You may call me by my Kurdish guerrilla name, “Heval Erdal”. I’m lanky and have a highly disarming grin, so say the ladies. I’m just having a kid, which is to say a laugh; the ladies don’t say anything like that. I’m British clearly, but also a cheeky part Jew. It’s not a very well thought out part to be honest. Don’t practice any of it. I became active in the Kurdish movement protesting Turkish arms deals and attending cultural events at the centers. My working-class British city had literally hundreds of Jihadists who took off for the Middle East and joined Daesh. Fuck all mate, hundreds! They took wee kids and wives with them. They thought it was the end of times. Well, it had end of times properties, I’ll give it that.” So, I was always a ‘wee activist’ with politics of the progressive kind, but I love them Kurds man! They’re so awesome. Humble, principled mountain people. Leftists. Warriors. Love um! Sometime in August of 2016 I made up my mind to travel to Kurdistan and join up with the People’s Protection Units; the famous and glorious Y.P.G.69.
So, I worked a bit more than usual. I saved up about 2,000 quid and there I had a chance to ask the right questions about who to contact, literally just an email address called YPG REVOLUTION, and I answered a bunch of questions for them. Then I was approved to go. It didn’t take nearly as long as lots of chaps complained. Britain has the second largest contribution of foreign fighters to Y.P.G./Y.P.J. right after Turkish leftists.
But life happens, you have a girlfriend you can’t bring, and you have an apartment you can’t just leave. You also have a bit of fear in you. No one wants to die! Unless you’re one of these Jihadist tossers. You make various excuses. Well not me, I don’t worry about dying. I had a pretty boring apartment. My job was bullocks. We all have bollocksy jobs, so it made it easier to leave mine and go, knowing how much I hated my current situation in what Kurds call Capitalist Modernity. Also, there were brave Hevals who went in earlier, when things were more desperate and asymmetrical.
I had become friendly with Heval Helen Qerechow, whose British name was Ana Campbell via the various protests and Kurdish events. She was far more ideological than I was. She was what we called later a ‘true believer’, a highly committed young revolutionary. Me, I just wanted to kill Daesh, and the Turkish fascists. I wasn’t stupid to the politics mind you, but I was more of the fighterly mind set. I had set myself on a warpath. I grew up working class and I would die working class, and revolution would never come home to the U.K., but if I could contribute well to the Y.P.G. and aid the Kurdish resistance then I would feel like I was a man of my word. All these years yelling about arms deals and Turkish coups all didn’t ever do much, but it was how you made friends with Hevals and aspiring Hevals. Heval in Kurdish means comrade/friend. It’s what movement people call each other affectionately and ideologically.
They had met just one weekend before herself deployment to Syria. I went out with Ana, and we talked a little bit about what we were risking and why we were risking it. She went in about five months before me. This was maybe on the eve of.
“I’m all in the game mate, I’m just all about it. As an anarchist and as a human, this is the real deal as I see it,” Ana declared.
“I mean eye to eye my sis, I agree,” I tells her.
“I mean as a woman and as an activist this seems so big, so important, how could we ever just go on and ignore this and act like we have and validity to our own fight?”
Ana always talked in big questions, rhetorical like ones for circular thinking.
“I mean are you scared?” she asks me, “I’m not scared at all.”
“No, not scared to die. Maybe scared to be tortured or maimed, but all part of a revolution I guess,” I reply.
“You must be brave. Everyone is watching us. The Kurds and the vultures, you know they want to make up stories about why we went out there, going out there to die in a foreign war, a Kurdish war! It’s our war, it’s the last stand for idealism.”
“It’s pathetic so few leftists are going, have gone,” I say.
“No, it’s up to us to be an example of trustworthy European leftists and what we can contribute. Everything must be about possibility not fear!”
“You’re a shining star,” I tell her.
“Serok Apo70 says that Women’s leadership is what saved the P.K.K. in Qandil and has saved the Rojava revolution.”
“Well surely it has,” I just agree with her now because I’m not ever one to argue with her on either Feminism or what Serok Apo said. She’s very ideological and I am not, so it’s easy to avoid contentious bickering.
“I’m so happy we’re both finally going,” she says.
“Yeah, good times,” I reply.
“We probably won’t see each other that often. The Y.P.J.71 has its own separate structures. How do you feel about that? I think I prefer the old way when we were all together.”
“I think I read they need to be able to tell the conservative Kurdish village fathers their daughters aren’t getting banged out in the P.K.K., and also because Kurdish Women’s Movement wants their own self-governing spaces.”
“Yeah, both. But anyway, we will meet up for tea and have long fireside talks about ideology like you love so much,” she smiles.
So, I was scheduled to begin the Academy in Qerechow72 in August of 2017. I had booked a direct flight to Erbil from Heathrow. Ana was in the class before me for the Y.P.J.; Women’s Protection Units, the co-gendered women’s structure. We had both been arrested several times scuffling with the Turkish security service at this demo or that. Never had any challenging times either of us. Well, why should we have? We were fighting for Kurdish Freedom, for peoples’ freedom; against fascists and Islamic terrorists, the kind that lived in Birmingham and migrated to Syria with their families for the war.
Now my motives were pure, but they were not purely ideological. Apo did not make me do it! I just felt that Daesh was a heinous evil. I felt the Turks to be true aggressors. And I wanted to avenge the fact that so many people from my city had headed over to the enemy. An enemy which throws homos off roof tops. Kidnaps and sex enslave young women. Commits genocide! And until Operation Inherent Resolve73 I.S.I.S. was gradually taking over the entire Middle East into their “Caliphate”.
“So, I packed my bag and joined the international volunteers!”
About five months later Anya went down to Rojava to join the Y.P.J. The proud, inglorious 500 or 600 so who ended up with the Y.P.G. and its various affiliated structures. The embarrassingly low turnout compared to the well over 40,000 Jihadists who turned out to join I.S.I.S. is a matter of leftist defeat, human cowardice, ineptitude of Kurdish propaganda, and the psychological barriers of joining a violent shit show that no one is clearly ever going to win.
Her last words before she left England were the same last words, she said to me before she was blown apart on the Afrin Front. The phrase has a couple of meanings to the Hevals. “Onwards to invincible victory,” or “Victory is certain ”, or in Kurmanji, “Serkaften ”.
To which I replied “Serchevan74.” On the eyes!
Within the next year Heval Errdal’s entire family would be arrested in the United Kingdom and charged with aiding terrorists financially and Anna Campbell would be dead in a Turkish airstrike.
“The Jewish Military Colony is filled with surveillance and informants, every phone is bugged, every email is read. The basis of any uprising must be so low tech that it leaves no fingerprints, a series of whispers, notes on paper, a war of cells.”
I went on another day trip to Be’er Sheva in the very beginning of August. The young, tough Gavroche went right to work enlisting the local, disaffected youth of the urban Be’er Sheva sprawl. He was not a great thinker. He was a young person of action. What he seemed to like was that there wasn’t too much of a preset plan. He did not have to read anything to join. That was the beauty of it that made so many people just plug in and fight. For years people had said things like this are only in the movies or in Russian literature.
None of that is important anymore though because we are a life support machine, a clandestine movement operating way behind the lines, which according to an unseen G-d, are our ancestorial homeland. You came by. You plugged in, or enlisted was a better word because by then we had written our own Kaaba, an internal proficiency and placement exam. You got talked about it because a friend had signed up. You saw a group of kids learning how to take a soldier’s weapon, saw them practicing martial arts in a park, and then one night it hit you. That fucking heroin dealer that used to be in that park was gone. So were the junkies posted up on the playground. You noticed the gang graffiti on the bombed-out buildings had been painted over. Sometimes just grey paint. Sometimes a small mural. Sometimes an odd black pictograph you had never seen in your life. A food basket ended up in front of your house. Just a little bundle, but if you are hard up enough any bit helps. It came again a few days later courtesy of Ha Irgun. You picked up someone hitchhiking and they put you on to our righteous revolution. That someone was always the young Zachariah Artstein making rounds with his old friend Hadas.
Zach got in trouble anytime we went up the hill to Jerusalem.
The Mugavnkiim arrested him and held him 48 hours when he tried crossing from East Jerusalem into Nablus’ Balata Refugee Camp. He had lost his passport some time ago and it was lucky they did not hand him over to the American embassy or deport him. On a trip before this one, we got caught up in some Arab quarter unrest and had to hide for a few hours in a metal shuttered market stall with a couple identical twin Palestinian brothers and their father as the Mugavnik storm troopers flooded the market with tear gas and shots rang out all afternoon.
But by the second week of August, we are solid in Tel Aviv. Mostly Black Israelites and European émigrés. The base of the Cabinet and flagship chapter was called the ManassehCommand. Our network was based out of the Deep Leisure Club and Avinadav’s loft on the edge of town. We had secured a printing facility and were working on secure lines of online communication.
We were also solid in Be’er Sheva led by Gavroche, Katusha, Sahar and a small army of punk rock kids and working-class hooligans. This formation we called the Judah Command. Out in the desert these young fighters were training on M1 rifles and learning Krav Maga. Expansion was being focused on christening cells in Ashdod, Arad and among the Bedouin settlements.
We were solid in Haifa too, a large cluster of Arab Christian youth led by the young preacher Deeb al Hadid and some Ashkenazi artstudents at the university on the top of Mt. Carmel who were led by a girl named Hadas, some one-time lover of Zach’s from the kibbutz days. The fighters up in Galilee we called the Asher Command.
There were several three to five person cells recently established in Pardes Hanna among Zach’s Russian immigrant friends. In Akko there were a couple of Arab Israeli girls who owned a tattoo parlor. Afula never seemed that solid. Bet She ‘an consisted of a kibbutz hippy and his boyfriend. There were a couple of paramedics in Rehovot. In Sheroot Lummi and in Netanya, it was more Russian street kid friends of Zach’s.
“In Jerusalem we are entirely without representation.”
There was just one single mission. We would drive the U.S. influence out of Israel, and we would make a stand for a government that upheld human rights. I had spent a good many nights wondering if Zach’s communism would set us free or just get us killed for nothing.
“For many years as a young girl I just hoped I’d go to heaven.” I pictured heaven as this endless beach with tall white castles and all the people I had ever loved were waiting for me to get there, waiting for me to come home. I wondered if God valued the work we were doing even if I was not sure about there being a God. But I could never make myself honestly believe. And now I knew that the only heaven I might ever live to see was the one I was ready to fight for then defend. The heaven we would create right here, right now, our Zion in the wilderness.
This Romanian Jewish girl Noaah was making the rounds to collect donations for our relief baskets. Gavroche’s ladylove Katusha was editing the articles that would go into the first edition of our mini newspaper. The little ones they called Sahar, and ‘Molly the Fairy’ were sweeping up this massive, abandoned building called the Bedouin School House where Zach and Molly lived in a room under the great stairs. She had become his little protégé. She followed him everywhere. The little Russian half pint street urchin had been made homeless because of an insane mother and an abusive father who was a self-professed ‘anarchist.’ She was just 13. Enormous glasses, bright outlandish clothing, little braids died different shades of pink. She adored Zach and believed in the ideas of Ha Irgun completely. Tribe Judah had a wide range of child soldiers, but it was the only command with predominantly Jewish members. Asher was Christian Arabs and Manasseh was mostly foreign expats and Black Israelites.
Three weeks ago, the Bedouin School House was overrun with narcomaniim until Gavroche, Big Guy, Zachariah, and few others from the Be’er Sheva Unit’s paramilitary arm EGROPH flooded the building with diverted sprinkler lines and then drove them out. The junkies moved into the abandoned military base on the other side of the electric neon Old City. Ha Irgun took over the enormous two-story Ottoman structure destined for many years to be a science center. The boys padlocked the doors shut, dragged in meeting tables, bricked up some windows and called it the KDAA, some made up word surely of Zach’s creation.
You can’t teach what we were preaching because we are making it up as we go along. And there was no one to compete with. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades kept everyone, for lack of a better phrase, “pretty fucking terrorized”. And all the while as both the second Intifada and our revolution unfolded around us so out of control, I never stopped to think which among us would be the victims of either of these little wars. The Palestinian war ever punctuated with a bullet or a bang. Ours new and in the shadows, but we’d have our bangs and bullets too before long.
On August 9th, Zach and I left Be’er Sheva bound for a third try at organizing the Capital city into a regional command to be dubbed Ephraim. We got there around noon and got lunch at Mike’s Place Jerusalem, a sister joint to the one managed by my close friend Canadian Dave. We took our time eating. I think the kid was a little burnt out. He’d been busy and never seemed to like coming to the holiest of holies. We were both more Tel Aviv kind of people. We made our way down to King George Street, one of the huge thoroughfares. Zach looked in his bag.
“Fuck,” he mutters.
“What is it?”
“I’m all out of art.”
Then three blocks ahead of us we heard a B-O-O-M! And I jump in the air and my bones rattle inside me. We freeze. For a second and then watch the smoke and dust settle. We do nothing helpful. Wait for a secondary explosion. The Palestinians have blown up a pizza place up the street. One of the few that still sell Pepperoni. People are screaming. The place is a hectic mess. Blood, dust, ambulance sirens. Zach slumps into a green bench on the road and takes off his hat, as he sometimes does when he gets impassioned or upset. The cloud of dust and the screams of wounded people does not stop until he flags us a cab and tells the driver to “get us back to Tel Aviv.” There’s the smoke, there’s the screams of the injured, the sirens. The ambulances show up and second bomber blows up the responding rescue crews.
B-O-O-M!
The Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing took place around 2pm. The blasts kill 15 people, including 7 small children, and wounded around 130. Both Hamas and the Islamic Jihad immediately claimed joint responsibility. The only thing he said on the road back to Tel Aviv, with soldiers and emergency medical personnel swarming to seal off the city was:
“I ain’t gonna to be caught dead in that city again.” But that was just how he talked when he was upset by the intifada and carnage. We obviously would be back when we had set up a cell. That is how organizing works; unreasonable persistence. Hand to hand, mouth to ear, little speeches, drawings in the sand, whispers about impossible sounding things. She showed me that summer was not just to go underground and become invisible to our enemies, she taught me how to breathe underwater and time.
I.
Dabka, also spelled Dabke, is a traditional folk dance that originates from the Levantine region, particularly Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and parts of Iraq. It is a lively and rhythmic dance that is often performed at weddings, festivals, and other cultural celebrations. The dance is characterized by its energetic footwork, synchronized movements, and vibrant music.
The origins of Dabke trace back centuries, with its roots deeply embedded in the cultural heritage of the Levant. Historically, Dabke was performed by villagers during harvest seasons or at joyous occasions to celebrate unity, solidarity, and cultural pride. Over time, it has evolved into a cherished tradition, passed down through generations and celebrated by people of all ages.
Dabke is not merely a dance; it’s a cultural expression, embodying the spirit and values of the Levantine people. It serves as a symbol of resilience, perseverance, and community cohesion in the face of adversity. The dance reflects the rich tapestry of Levantine culture, blending elements of music, dance, and storytelling into a vibrant spectacle.
The dance typically begins with a group of dancers forming a circle or line, holding hands, or linking arms. The music starts with a lively rhythm, often accompanied by traditional instruments such as the oud, tabla, and mijwiz. As the music intensifies, so does the energy of the dancers. The footwork in dabka is intricate and dynamic, involving stomping, shuffling, and quick steps. Dancers often wear traditional attire, including colorful dresses for women and keffiyehs (traditional Arab headdress) for men, adding to the visual spectacle of the performance.
One of the most captivating aspects of dabka is its synchronized movements. Dancers move in harmony, following the lead of a designated leader or “Raqis,” who sets the pace and rhythm for the group. The movements are often improvisational, with dancers adding their own flair and style while maintaining synchronization with the group.
As the dance progresses, the tempo may vary, with moments of fast-paced footwork interspersed with slower, more graceful movements. Throughout the performance, there is a sense of camaraderie and joy among the dancers, as they come together to celebrate their cultural heritage.
The significance of dabka extends beyond its entertainment value. It serves as a form of cultural preservation, keeping alive traditions that have been passed down through generations. In a rapidly changing world, dabka provides a sense of continuity and connection to the past, fostering a keen sense of identity and belonging among participants.
Moreover, Dabke serves as a bridge between different communities, transcending barriers of language, religion, and ethnicity. It is often performed at multicultural events and festivals, where it brings people together in celebration of diversity and shared humanity.
In recent years, Dabke has gained popularity beyond the Levantine region, with dance groups and cultural enthusiasts around the world embracing this vibrant tradition. From dance studios to university campuses, dabka workshops and performances offer people of all backgrounds an opportunity to experience the joy and beauty of this ancient art form.
In conclusion, Dabke is much more than just a dance; it is a celebration of culture, heritage, and community. With its infectious energy, rhythmic footwork, and rich symbolism, dabka continues to captivate audiences and inspire people of all ages to connect with their roots and celebrate the diversity of the human experience.
S C E N E (II)
نيويوركغراد
NEWYORKGRAD, USA, 2025ce
***
It all happens amazingly fast. As though a great deal of preparation and training has gone into it. Women and children are separated as quickly as possible and pushed outside. Soon, diplomats and various second tier world leaders are being zip tied, then wrapped in booby trapped explosives that look like Christmas lights.
There were many screams and protestations at first, then only whimpering and begging to be released. Amidst the vibrant lights and bustling energy of the Millenium Theatre, a hostage crisis unfolded, shattering the illusion of entertainment, and plunging the venue into chaos. The assailants, masked with flickering faces, and heavily armed, stormed the premises during a sold-out performance, catching both audience members and staff completely off guard. Panic swept through the theater as screams pierced the air and confusion reigned. A diplomat is pistol whipped. A few warning shots go off. The hostages were tied together into bundles. Anyone that spoke was hit in the face.
As the situation escalated, law enforcement swiftly mobilized, surrounding the theater and the NYPD is attempting to initiate negotiations with the perpetrators.
A female terrorist with brown hair tied off in a bun; she passes demands out the barricaded entrance door. They are then released in a video. “WE ARE HOLDING OVER 800 INTERNATIONAL HOSTAGES. ALL ADULT MALE UN STAFF, POLITICIANS, ELITES AND VARIOUS CELEBRITIES. In one hour, we will begin executing UN personnel beginning with European countries unless the NYPD withdraw completely in a five-block radius. There are explosives attached to the hostages and all over the building. ANY GAS, ANY RAID, WE WILL BLOW EVERYTHING UP.”
Inside, tension hung thick, each passing moment fraught with uncertainty and fear. The hostages, trapped in a nightmare of uncertainty, clung to hope, their fates hanging in the balance. Some that tried to make speeches were beaten. Their mouths taped.
Outside, a tense standoff ensued, with ERU teams poised for action and negotiators working tirelessly to secure the safe release of the hostages. Time seems to stretch endlessly as the world holds its breath, waiting for a resolution to the harrowing ordeal. So many powerful people taken hostage, so many celebrities.
Amidst the chaos, stories emerged as individuals within the theater huddled together, offering comfort and support to one another in the face of danger. Families anxiously awaited news of their loved ones, their hearts heavy with dread yet buoyed by the glimmer of hope. “They’re communicating in Kurdish,” someone whispers. “What do they want,” someone else whispers.
A second communique was put out on video, but a terrorist claiming to be “Emma”. Delivered in English with Hebrew and Arabic subtitles:
WE WILL EXECUTE A HOSTAGE EVERY HALF HOUR UNLESS ISRAEL OPENS ITS NORTHERN BORDER TO THE REFUGEES, ENTERS A CEASFIRE IN GAZA, AND ALLOWS PALESTINIAN MIGRATION DOWN TO THE 32-degree LATITUDINAL LINE. ANY ATTEMPT TO RETAKE THE THEATRE WILL RESULT IN A DETONATION OF EXPLOSIVES THROUGHOUT.
Eventually, after 72 hours of tense negotiations, the crisis reached its bloody conclusion. Through the combined efforts of law enforcement and skilled negotiators, the hostages were not freed, but their ordeal ended. The NYPD began filling the Theatre with odorless gas.
At some point shots were exchanged. A raid began. Soon after a series of explosions which killed all the hostages and at least twenty of the terrorists. When the gas, dust, ash, and debris settled, the media circus began, but everyone was dead, or mostly dead.
The standoff in Gaza and Northern Israel, Southern Lebanon Border was utterly unchanged, unaffected.
“Though scars, both physical and emotional, will linger, the resilience of the human spirit prevailed, offering a beacon of hope in the aftermath of such a tragedy.”
The Millennium Theatre Hostage Crisis was after 9.11, the second largest terror attack on US soil. Who it killed was a veritable who is who of diplomatic personnel and lesser world leaders. It was claimed all the terrorists died, but that is not true at all. Two survived, and both are today Israelite passport holders. In the words of the Western Media, this bloody debacle was called the “Millenium Theatre Hostage Crisis,” but in the papers of the Arab street; “the Newyorkgrad Christmas Massacre.” Terror on U.S. soil over foreign policy decisions being made in the Middle East.
S C E N E (II)
BEIRUT, 2024ce
Yousef Bashir arrives in Beirut under a heavy, quiet sky, checking into the Lancaster Hotel in Raouche—a faded, discreet shell of a place with good-sized bathtubs, broken cameras, and no questions asked. It’s no coincidence. It’s close to the camps. The first three that will open. The ones they’ve been talking about since grad school.
Back in 2013, Sebastian gave Yousef a lift in a white Honda Civic, an act that seemed simple but wasn’t. Two young men, burned by history, bleeding into each other’s narratives—Sebastian, a Zionist trying to scrape the blood off his ideology, and Yousef, a Palestinian survivor with a bullet in his chest and a memory that doesn’t forget who put it there. They met at Brandeis, shared lectures and whiskey, pain and plans. Yousef had been saved by Israeli doctors but raised by war. Sebastian had found his Jewishness in the ashes of Auschwitz and lost his innocence somewhere in Ramallah.
They weren’t enemies. They were worse—mirror images trying to outmaneuver history. Their solution wasn’t a state, not another line on a British-made map. It was something bigger: a Confederation of the broken. Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine—not as failed states, but as one stitched-together body trying to breathe again. Grad school madness, or maybe the only sanity left.
But underneath all the theory, all the shared speeches and sleepless strategy sessions, was an old truth Yousef carried in his bones: You never forgive the man who turns your home into a prison, who shoots you in the chest, even if he stitches you up afterward. You wait. For decades, for generations if you must. And then, you teach them what fear really means.
When Sebastian asked, “Are you talking about my people or yours?”
Yousef didn’t blink. “Mine.”
But both knew. It was never just one land for one people. Those were vicious lies. Not to believed anymore. Not ever again.
II.
Once upon a time in the city of Aley—perched between mountains and the sea—lived Nadia, a storyteller revered for her gift. Each evening, people gathered beneath the town’s ancient olive tree, captivated by the tales she spun. One night, a curious young girl approached her and pleaded, “Tell me a story.” With a warm smile, Nadia replied, “Of course, my Habibi. But first, let me show you the power of a single story.” And so she did, weaving a tale of courage and heartbreak that left the girl speechless, her heart stirred. “I never knew a story could feel like that,” the girl whispered. Nadia nodded gently. “A story can heal, unite, or spark change. It reminds us we are not alone.” As the stars lit the sky, they sat together sharing stories, knowing that even in a world unraveling, storytelling could still forge hope.
Far from Aley, in a New Jersey restaurant, a Lebanese man named Souheil Tajer sat across from a man who claimed to be many things—an artist, a former fighter, a dreamer—named Sebastian Adonaev. Over mezze and memories, Sebastian spoke of his time fighting in Syria, serving as a medic during the fall of Mosul, witnessing the brutal siege of Hajin. He shared his vision of a Middle East Confederation, stitched together not by borders but by shared humanity. Souheil listened, skeptical yet intrigued. The proposal wasn’t novel—talk of confederations was “in” now, with Lebanon crumbling into cantons and factions—but there was something about Sebastian’s energy, his audacity, that stuck.
Sebastian spoke of friends from his youth—an Iranian, a Maronite—and how he felt closer to them than to his own people. “My skin is white, my faith half-held,” he said. “But the Levant is in my blood. History isn’t past to me. It breathes through me.” Souheil raised an eyebrow, “That sounds awfully Zionist.” “Confederalist,” Sebastian corrected. “The Jewish tragedy doesn’t grant us a license to dominate. All the borders here were drawn to divide, not to serve.”
In a world on fire, where hope often feels like smoke, Sebastian still believed in the impossible. And maybe, just maybe, that was the beginning of another circular story.
S C E N E (III)
بيروت
BEIRUT, 2024ce
***
“Let me begin by saying that the Jew of Beirut is kind!”
So, if anyone ever accused this man of madness, hijackings, robbery, or vice, or immoral acts of cavorting with criminals and whores, all would be fast to say, it is not true. That is not this man! And, they would say, “Go throughout our city asking questions because this man came to us at a tough and strange time with a giving of his whole self.” He, employed, deployed his whole heart and naked soul and opened his pockets on the streets of Beirut for us to see into him. He was in some ways the finest of his kind, in other ways, a crude foreigner, but he was indeed filled with “old soul” and we saw what he said and did; clearly. Well, he has a loveable madness.
They say here, that “the Roots of the Righteous will grow like a cedar in Lebanon” and he did immediately. He flourished, he wilted, and he died three whole times in just forty days for us, to impress us; or almost impress us. Or just to impress upon us that his soul is an old soul, his roots, are from here. Or at least next door.
The Jew of Beirut has a name of course and that name is Sebastian Adonaev. His Kunya is “Abu Yazan,” because at some time during the Isis Wars, he took on the name of the illegitimate half-Druze son of his ex-romantic partner Polina Mazaeva. He also has a Kurdish name if you can even believe such robust internationalism: Kawa Zivistan; the blacksmith of winter; from his time serving in the YPG12. A Kurdish militia he served with in Syria. But we trusted and mostly still trust him. Though not completely with marrying our daughters, unless of course, he converts to Islam or Christianity depending which faction he wants to marry into. He is not wealthy or internationally famous to marry a Druze. Even if he were, we would all trust him even less, and kind of frown on those kinds of unions. Those people think they all come back, that makes them a little fancy if you ask around.
As we tried and recalled the speed of it all in an existential moment, he fell out of the sky into our laps and eventually hearts. Yet, this man was coming to know us, in our hardest times since the civil conflict. He sought to know not only about our current dire straits, but our epic past and a possible, yet improbable glorious future! He was not pursuing “unique experiences” instead he pursued a life he did not get to lead, at least not yet. An old saying of Kahil Gibran: “If I was not born Lebanese, I would have pursued it!”
The Jew of Beirut is a paramedic by trade. Which means at least he is good with his hands when it matters the most. Existing somewhere between a doctor and a bandit. That causes him to want to help anyone and everyone all at once, as well as have an eye for certain details. And so, he encountered us too, as a partly trained lawyer and a full-blown poet, a partisan commander of sorts in his left labor movement, a painter and a life lover; a hustler, a lover, a wide talker; in multilingualism so basically already in a sense fully Lebanese!? No, of course not, but he exudes the energy we have in us as a people surely. A laugh in the face of terrible odds, a free life with style.
They say the Jews are a people with no roots, a drifting trickster people. But as his tribe is known for, he tried to make himself valuable. And valuable we would certainly later declare him to be. A real Bonafide “Middle Eastern gentleman;” “one of us.” Though which faction could claim him?
No one knows precisely how many Jews are left in Lebanon. Maybe ten, maybe forty, maybe just one. But they are certainly one of eighteen classified and protected identities. So, all of them are welcome here in some form! If they are not part of a Zionist invader plot. Preferably if they convert to any of the 17 other confessions before marrying anyone. That would be preferred.
They say, “he is writing something about us.” Trying to translate some shall we call it Eastern-Western-Middle Eastern poetry? Something about a “confederation from the Maghreb to the Indus”; talk of a noble mad man.
When they finally arrested the Jew wandering around the working-class Shi’a neighborhood called Chiya he did not know where he was, did not even know what he was. He certainly did not have any “so-called EMT program” in mind at that point.
“A promising idea for a vacation was somewhere with a beach, and they do not hate Americans openly and do not want to immediately kill Jews. A bad idea is a place where just being you makes you a threat to a potentially considerable number of the natives, to several of the population; where being you could get you in trouble. Troubles such as when a citizen patrol stops you and an off-duty cop puts you in some handcuffs. And natives are going in pockets for papers.”
“You’re making us look bad!” yells Yaelle D’Arrigo in his head. Yaelle is his new Vice President and his voice of reason and constraint. Her role as acting President while he travels to Lebanon speaks to who he thinks he can trust, and Sicilian Puerto Rican EMT Yaelle D’Arrigo is stone cold tough, and he trusts her. But she cannot help him now.
They cuff him from the front, which means they don’t really think he’s an actual threat and they go in his pockets and take out his wallet which sort of proves he’s a well-meaning tourist and not an ill meaning spy; since the wallet confirms he’s a paramedic from the city of New York, and an American not an Israeli.
“Is he drunk?” the off-duty cop asks in French.
“I cannot believe you got arrested already,” says Yaelle in his head, “In Chiya of all places. Making pour team look terrible!”
“Why are you here?” the off-duty cop asks. A small crowd had formed, “why are you here in Beirut?!”
“You’re making us look bad,” says Yaelle in his head. Then there is another voice inside his head, where it comes from and who it speaks for no one knows yet:
“If you want to save Yaelle’s life you have to ROAR! KUJUCHAGULIA!and throw this law man across the very pavement; and beat his fucking ass!” Then: “do something really extra fucking crazy so they have to tie you to a chair and disregard you, long enough to escape”, says a voice in his head.
“That is if you want Yaelle to live, if you do not care about the lives of your friends then just go quietly. They are going to throw little Karessa of a plane with no parachute and splatter her on Martyr Square.” And then you fight your way through the unbreathing gloom!
In his head he wonders if everyone here is just an actor, gathered at dusk, watching him in hand cuffs. He is in one of those sensitivity training villages like in Jordan filled with actors playing Arab civilians. A teaching movement. The off-duty cop slaps him, “Why are you knocking on people’s doors man!”
In Chiya, Beirut the Shiite part of town. He sees a mental of the CIA pushing his little Asian girlfriend Karessa Abe out a plane cargo for and she explodes on the ground of Martyr Square like a red pasta coconut. Of course he does not want anything to happen to his friends.
He yells” “! KUJICHAGULIA!” And throws all his weight at the off-duty copper knocking them both on the ground then he takes off running down the poorly paved street, unlit boulevard howling into the night.
“You’re definitely making us look bad!” shouts big breasted Yaelle in his head.
“Why are you going to Beirut!” Karessa cried the night he left. She begged him not to go. She knew it was potentially a one-way trip. As he runs through the Beirut night, still in cuffs down the unlit streets of Chiya, all he can think about, all he can picture is that there are different layers to the world, and he is crossing over into an uncharted realm. As if, as if, in this world of layers you could take a deep breath, and drop yourself into a subverted reality, a whole other plane of being. And in the movement, in the passing through to the other side if you retained your perspective, you could learn something, even teach something to people that see and live in only one reality of their own creation. And it was if, almost if, you could look into the very eyes of G-d.
I.
THE WORLD DOES NOT FIT BETWEEN ONE RIVER AND ONE SEA
A Manifesto for a Middle East Confederation
For thousands of years, our peoples—Judeans and Arabs, Persians and Kurds, Phoenicians and Assyrians, Maronites, Druze, Sunni and Shi’a, Zoroastrians and Christians—have gathered, dispersed, returned, and endured at the crossroads of empires. We have traded, fought, intermarried, shared holy books, and built civilizations. We carry memories across deserts and borders, in prayer and rebellion. We are many tribes and many nations. But we are all old peoples who do not forget.
Yet never have we killed each other as we do now. Never have we been so thoroughly armed, divided, surveilled, and puppeteered by powers that lie outside our region—empires that pretend to bring peace while they ship weapons, harvest oil, and dictate terms.
This treatise is not a call for naïve peace. We do not believe the road to peace lies through summit tables in Western capitals. We do not believe that interfaith dialogue or nostalgic myths will save us. We are not pro-peace. We are pro-survival. Pro-dignity. Pro-living on our own terms. What we seek is a Hudna—a long and stable ceasefire. A geopolitical architecture where our differences are not erased but made governable.
A New Reality: The Need for Confederation
The modern Middle East has become a graveyard of failed states and false promises. Every major actor—Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan—is entangled in regional proxy conflicts, fueled by foreign money and arms. No side has the capacity to annihilate the others. And no side is truly sovereign.
What we propose is not a new empire, nor a fantasy pan-nationalism. We propose a Middle Eastern Confederation: a voluntary alliance of peoples, not imposed states. It is rooted in democratic autonomy, self-governing cantons, shared defense, economic cooperation, and most critically—universal human rights.
This Confederation would span from the Western Maghreb to the Indus Valley, anchored initially in:
Israel & Palestine (as co-founding adversaries in a necessary ceasefire)
Iran, with its deep regional influence and revolutionary security doctrine
Türkiye, with strategic geography and military-industrial capabilities
Saudi Arabia, central to oil, religion, and regional diplomacy
Pakistan, a nuclear power and key Sunni actor
It would include other key nations—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Sudan, Afghanistan, Armenia, and Kurdistan—some existing, some still struggling for recognition.
Each ethnic, religious, or tribal group would retain cultural and legal autonomy within its canton, under a federal framework enforcing only two principles:
Universal human rights, including gender equality and the right to secular governance
Mutual non-aggression, upheld by a unified Defense Force and Civil Service
Why Now? Why Us?
The current order is untenable. Since 1920, the region has been in near-constant war. The Arab-Israeli conflict alone has claimed fewer lives than many assume (~50,000), but it draws in all regional players and destabilizes broader peace. Meanwhile, the Syrian Civil War has killed over 500,000. Yemen, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan remain in ruins. All fueled by foreign intervention and sectarian hatred.
If we do not change course now, we face collapse. Oil reserves will run dry in 100–200 years. Climate shocks and demographic shifts will escalate. Proxy wars will continue. Nuclear war is not unthinkable. The status quo leads to annihilation.
The world obsesses over the Israeli Palestinian conflict, but peace there will not resolve the larger regional crisis. Yet without a durable ceasefire—a Hudna—between Israelis and Palestinians, no broader Confederation is possible. The road to regional survival runs through a very narrow pass: a truce and eventual reorientation between Israel and its historic enemies, not as friends, but as mutually surviving civilizations.
What Must Be Done
Israel must reorient away from Euro-American hegemony, and embrace its Middle Eastern identity
Iran must be recognized as a regional pillar, not excluded for ideological reasons
Hamas must be engaged, not demonized—because no settlement is possible without them
Kurdish national ambitions must be legitimized, as a stabilizing civil force in the region
Saudi Arabia and Türkiye must relinquish their roles as proxies of Western and pan-Islamic agendas
The people—not the states—must lead: tribes, cantons, militias, civil society, and revolutionary movements
This is not an academic exercise or a utopian dream. It is a geopolitical necessity. A confederation of diverse peoples living under a shared roof—not because we love each other, but because the alternative is annihilation.
A Call to the People of the Region
This is not written by diplomats or foreign consultants. It is written by survivors: Israelis and Palestinians, Persians and Kurds, Arabs and Armenians, men and women who have lost homes, family, and faith to the fires of endless war. We do not come with blueprints. We come with memory. We come with vision.
If we cannot pray the same way, or speak the same tongue—then let us agree to trade. If not to love, then to coexist. Let us retreat into our own communities, under our own laws, but agree to a joint defense and mutual respect.
Enough blood. Enough foreign lies. Enough pretending this is normal.
Hudna. Ceasefire. Separation. Confederation.
This is our offer. To all who are tired of dying for borders and beliefs we did not choose. To all who remember the ancestors, and want their children to live.
S C E N E (IV)
Aley, 1984ce
***
Once upon a time, in a bustling city called Aley nestled between the mountains and the sea, there lived a storyteller named Nadia. She was known everywhere for her ability to weave tales that captivated the hearts and minds of all who listened. Every evening, as the sun dipped below the horizon and the stars emerged in the night sky, people would gather around Nadia to hear her stories.
One evening, as Nadia sat beneath the ancient olive tree in the town square, a young girl approached her with a curious expression. “Tell me a story, please,” the girl pleaded, her eyes shining with anticipation. Nadia smiled warmly and beckoned the girl to sit beside her. “Of course, my Habibi. But first, let me tell you about the power of a single story. Before it is unleashed.”
With that, Nadia began to spin a tale unlike any other, a story of love and loss, of courage and redemption. As she spoke, the girl listened intently, hanging on to every word as if her very life depended on it. And when Nadia reached the end of the story, the girl sat in stunned silence, her heart deeply moved by the tale she had heard.
“That was just amazing,” the girl exclaimed, her eyes shining with wonder. “I never knew that a story could have such power. Or that stories inside stories, inside stories even still exist!”
Nadia nodded, her own eyes twinkling with wisdom. “Indeed, my dear. A single story has the power to change hearts, to inspire minds, to bridge divides. It can lift us up in times of darkness and guide us along the path to enlightenment. But perhaps most importantly, a single story has the power to connect us to one another, to remind us of our shared humanity, and to unite us in our common journey through life.”
And so, as the stars shimmered overhead and the night air hummed with the magic of storytelling, Nadia and the young girl sat together beneath the olive tree, sharing tales of wonder and wisdom until the wee hours of the morning. And though they may have been just two voices in a world filled with billions, they knew in their hearts that the power of a single story could change the world.
***
Something about shards of manuscripts he had cobbled into something very grandiose sounding called “The Rise of the Middle East Confederation,” but that was not that subversive because talk of Confederalism was “very in now.” As the world was unraveling faster each day. In Lebanon, now that the economy did not exist and at least 5 of 18 ethnic confessions run their own ethnic cantons; namely the Maronites of Kataeb (Lebanese Forces), the Druze (Progressive Socialist Party), the Shi’a (under Hezbollah and a lesser way Amal), and the Sunni had their parties too. Hamas, Popular Front for the Future Movement, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Fatah, and the Lion’s Den hid among the 12 camps of Palestinians, hiding in plain sight. No one wants anyone going out of the camps and attaching itself to the Sunni demographic. There has not been a census since 1932, but all suspect the Shi’a are getting bigger than the confessional allotment of the Taif Accords.
“We are all in need of something to believe,” an old song goes, “hope is a smoke.”
Now, the power of a single story told over a multi-course Lebanese meal in New Jersey convinced Souheil Tajer he was dealing with a genuine article. A person, Sebastian, who was obviously Lebanese in another life. And if not Lebanese in another life, someone who was an artistic soul. Writing something noble albeit something one might have to high on drugs to think was a viable plan.
But it was not a single story. It was two, or three, each of varying levels of non-authentication. It was two sentimental tales followed up by a powerful rhetorical device about the impossible. Or at least the possibility of impossible things breaking ground. Sneaking out of boats in the night. Turn the rifles into plow shears and art.
Sebastian confided in Souheil that growing up in kindergarten to 8th grade at the United Nations school his best boyhood to young adult friends were an Iranian named Gyve Safavi and a Maronite named Danny Czar. Thus, in comfort, he felt closer to the Shi’a and Maronites than he even did to his own people the Zionists, ehm, I mean Jews. Which were fully interchangeable words too many these days.
The second story was about 9 months that the Jew served as a medical volunteer, really a non-shooting fighter in Iraq and Syria during the Isis Wars. He had been at the fall of Mosul when they massacred the Isis forces, forced finally to surrender the second biggest City in Iraq after a Stalingrad-like siege. He had been there when Isis was mostly wiped out (before they regrouped thanks to the Saudis) in Hajin, Deir Ez Zor.
So even though Souheil told him “This is, consequently, one of the worst times you could have ever picked to go.” He had gotten his plane tickets just before the Palestinian pogrom of October 7th which took several hundred hostages and butchered 1,200-something civilians, then resulted in Israel committing the ongoing quite possibly “war crimes” that have blown apart about 30,000 and counting people in Gaza. Shows no sign of slowing down.
The two stories resonated but so did the energy of the 39-year-old Sebastian Adonaev. Souhail read over the draft introduction to Rise of the Middle East Confederation, and it stated as a multiplicity of Middle Eastern voices, found it sane, and honest.
SOUHEIL TAJER
“What is your interest in my country?”
SEBASTIAN ADONAEV
We all have an imagined identity. My white skin, my Hebrew cult half beliefs, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the Crusades, the three wars with Rome; to me are not history. They are my peoples lived and living connection to the soul and being of the Levant. And in that light, the national borders, the wars of states are arbitrary and serve only divisive violence. They serve only oligarchy and outsiders.
SOUHEIL
Quite a Zionist idea.
SEBASTIAN
Confederalist, not Zionist. Nothing about the Jewish historical experience allows us a free license to trample the rights of other peoples. To me the national borders are all arbitrary drawn by Ottomans and Sykes Picot. To me, the Turks and then the Europeans handpicked little groups to lord over fake states, little more than plantations, and now we see that all unraveling.
SOUHEIL
It has been unraveling faster each day since October 7th.
The Palestinians are a source of great controversy and only Hezbollah panders to them out of spite for the Zionists they exchange rocket fire with, as well as a history of pandering to them. Everyone wishes the Palestinians would just go away and now there are 1.5-2 million Syrian refugees to contend with. Syrian beggar children are everywhere. That is 4 refugees for every 1 citizen. You can get Syrian beggar gypsies on like every corner of the Muslim Ras Beirut.
What is your relationship to the Palestinians?
SEBASTIAN
Those are my cousins. They make convincing poets and above average terrorists. That said, I have never had Palestinians try and kill me, where my own people have worked overtime. I have never met a Palestinian that I could not wage a struggle with.
SOUHEIL
I would like you to spend a week in the Chouf and share some of these ideas with my Druze friends. He has a similar thinking to you. Perhaps a great collective unconscious has begun to bring the people of the region to new, better, saner ideas. Your collaboration might yield some interesting conversations. Perhaps, in our lifetimes, before a line is crossed, we may act on some of them. The Chouf is magic. The Druze, well you know the Druze have seen many things, they claim to come back.
SEBASTIAN
I would love to. Sounds very peaceful.
SOUHEIL
You wear so many interesting hats. Student of law. Paramedic practitioner. And human rights champion. But, as a writer you must tread carefully if you are seeking to make useful writing for those that live in the Middle East; the hard part is not becoming an “Arabist,” as in seeing us from your own world view. It is almost impossible for you to be an “Orientalist,” seeing the world from our view. As an internationalist, with some useful skills, you are welcome in my country now or anytime, but not now is an unbelievably troubled time.
SEBASTIAN
I am not going to try and convince anyone of any kind of thinking or of new zealous beliefs. I assume the role of a polite guest. Conversationally, I do have some ideas. A fusion of human rights and Middle Eastern shall we say destiny.
SOUHEIL
But be a tourist for now. Tourism is going to bring you unique and exciting experiences, but I will give you some numbers of some old friends I think could help you or at least provide interesting conversations. Just in case you run out of things to do. Or are in the general market for interesting conversations.
Souheil Tajer gives the Jew the phone numbers of several prominent Maronites, Druze, and Orthodox to help him if he gets in trouble. Though he suspects the Jew has slightly more subversive intention than mere tourism, it did not seem dangerous yet to aid and abet his augmented tourism. He was on both an extremely specific mission planned a decade before and was going to try and convince a lot of people of something very radical: that the Middle East could be confederated. That the Middle East could end the dominance of foreigners and embrace democratic autonomy.
S C E N E (V)
اربيل
“ERBIL,” “ARBIL,” “HEWLER,” Iraq, 2014ce
***
“The order to evacuate Erbil was given just an hour ago. But we evidently have ignored it.”
We are at the precipice of civilization. At a hotel roof bar in the world’s oldest, continuously inhabited city. Just me, a good looking shall we call it “Dutch journalist?” My new friend and associate, “Abu Hamza”, is a Kurdish patriot from Kirkuk. Also, the last remaining waiter; chain smoking and watching the telescreen nervously. I hold a book, well more of a rhetorical report on ‘capitalist modernity’.
“Total chaos,” says Abu Hamza13.
Just outside the city, to the Southwest, in the darkness are gathering hordes. Bearded men in black hoods, capable of unlimited violence. Many thousands of them. Actually? allegedly? Who knows? Not coalition military intelligence. With belt fed machine guns mounted on pickup trucks and ferociously sharp blades. The horde is at the gates. “Daesh”, “ISIS” is here. The city is understandably in a total panic. Tens of Thousands have already fled for the mountains.
It is called “Erbil” by the Arabs and “Hewler” by the Kurds.
The citadel is looped by ring roads. And thus, from the air it looks like a target. Newly paved, well-lit highways link hotels to malls to mosques to shopping centers. This is a city on the very edge of oblivion. Each tower, each pylon, each bolt, each cocktail; 6,000 years of human civilization brought to the full hilt. To the Maximum.
The defense of the city, managed by two factions of Kurdish Peshmerga and the CIA will revolve around using the hotels as sniper points, and fighting ring by ring. The last point of defense will be the Citadel at the center.
On the second innermost highway ring, of the 1,000 Meter Road, atop the Dedeman Hotel. Here we find a mixed-race European Justine. Her last name is slightly different on several official documents. It’s a little hard to pronounce. She sits for twilight libation. “If the defenses don’t hold and the air strikes don’t materialize, it’s gonna be a real dry town fast.”
“A contextual report on the Crisis in Greater Kurdistan.” From Case Officer Justine Tomas Falafarian to her colleagues in the Kurdistan Workers Party. On the eve of the battle for Erbil.
ABU HAMZA
The temperature went over 114 degrees today in Erbil City Streets. I am on the roof of a newly erected brutalist slab housing tower on the One Thousand Meter Ring Road to the southeast of Hewler. I took a little break. To watch the last lights of the sun dip below the low range to the West of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city. The whole roof is lit up in white lights. I will continue the broadcast. Any hour now we’ll be going over the border into what’s left of Syria. Into Rojava. Into a Revolution inside a grisly Civil war whose outcome is very much still up in the air. If Erbil falls tonight, sooner than later hopefully.
Abu Hamza looks a little, shall we say, fucking dower. Probably calculating just how indefensible the city is, based on how many Peshmerga militia have fled, or will soon flee.
JUSTINE TOMAS FALAFARIAN
“When you open your paper, turn on your TV, or boot up your smartphone and attempt to understand what is happening; you are already tuned into people paid well to validate a view you already had!”
One such view is that there is a war going on between Islam and the mainly Christian Eastern & Western Bloc that affects China too. Both Russia and the United States have been poorly managing Wahhabi-Salafist terror in their countries since long before the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991. The United States by funding it and Russia by committing war crimes against whoever deploys it against them or their interests. China has been battling Islamic separatists that wish to section off 1/5 of its country to the Northwest in Xinjiang province. Perhaps what you tune into tells you it’s all some massive clash of civilizations. This ridiculous idea was popularized by Samuel Huntington in 1992. Other writers and pundits declare the events all part of a long-running proxy war extending past when Francis Fukuyama ended history after the Cold War. If you’re deeply religious, and much of the human race is, you might periodically wonder if this is the end of time. As humans have wondered many, many times before. Neither the media nor the thought leaders nor your religious intuitions are paid by telling the truth. They are paid because you like how they interpret horrifying, unpredictable events for you. You subscribe to their interpretations because they assist you in rationalizing, wholly irrational human behavior, predatory government malfeasance, and social policies that enable a virtually endless war.
From your house of worship or via your TV screen you might try to rationalize what’s happening here in the killing fields of the Middle East through the prism of your respective prophet’s scriptures or favorite pundit’s words. The news is a nasty circular addiction. A part of religion is a repetitive act of denial. You almost must always deny that vast portions of the rest of your species are even loved or protected by God. This allows a dynamic whereby you systematically begin to not care as much about whole blocks of other humans, based on something you must have faith is real, but cannot be proved by science or reason. So, in many regards, any group of religious practitioners that equate Godly protection to a set of scriptures is always probably re-written and re-translated by a fallible man. It is implicit to accept the belief that your hands are washed off much of humanity’s manifest suffering. But the wretched of the earth are statistically Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu in relatively equal proportions. But let’s look at the flood of violence from this phase of this longest war today. Let us try to be dispassionate! Objective and rational, without losing our solidarity or our souls.
I can only assure you on the political science and international development level it is wholly rational what is happening in the world today. Outside of wars for diminishing resources, prophetic revelations, and clashing civilizations. It is the product of high-level planning and an absence of low-level care. We might extend that to the human tragedy generally and the Middle East Highly specifically.
“The steak is just as tender in New York, London, Geneva, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Beijing, Shanghai, St. Petersburg, and Moscow!”
The politicians in these places and those who manage them live in a similar style of home. People who own energy companies, big financial firms, manage banks, own arms, or information tech companies; their mansions and yachts have similar styles and elite luxury amenities. The suits that their businessmen wear is of similar styles and fine materials. The sports cars their kids drive is all around the same speeds, and costs since luxury items are all price fixed. The women for sale in all three power blocks have the same price tags and services for sale.
Thank G-d the “Cold War” is supposedly over because, for a cold war, a kind of hot series of medium-scale wars, civil wars, and highly bloody armed events occurred in almost every single country on earth between 1945 and 1991. Although most respective national histories are total propaganda by omission, it has been agreed in the West that Communism was soundly disproven and defeated and of course, the West allegedly ended history and “won.” But the Pax American of 1989 to 2001 was short-lived. We are supposedly all very democratic in the West.We have Republican or Parliamentary governments with generally only two major opposing parties and free-market economies. The Russians supposedly are that thing called Democracy as well. After all the looting that happened in the gangland 90s under the Shock Doctrines. Nigeria will tell you it is a democracy and so will a lot of other people. It is hard to find a Kurdish political party without the word Democracy in it. The absolute most war town, brutal, depraved place on earth is called the Democratic Republic of Congo.
We all have highly Managed-Democracies. Scripted even. They are managed differently in Russia than in the West. Also, generally with two parties of angry, loud ambitious lawyers, technocrats and oligarchs trying their hands at populism. In European social democracies, after looting the entire earth, they raised taxes and funded social services. Well certainly in Russia with only one relevant Party Yedinaya Rossiya (United Russia), democracy is slightly easier to implement. In Russia, the Communist Party is still the second-biggest party. Anyone effectively opposing United Russia or even writing about it in a negative way is promptly killed. Its corruption is referred to as the “party of crooks and thieves.” But most Russians agree that Vladimir Putin has restored security and dignity to Russia. America is a back-and-forth two-party state, and Russia is a multiple-party, one-party state. Designer consumer goods are readily available in both places. Russians as the losers of the Cold War are demographically poorer than Americans, but Russians have higher rates of university graduation and literacy. Both have pretty enormous domestic reserves of fossil fuels. This is why their ferocious Middle Eastern proxy war cannot be just about oil at all.
China has a strong one-party state, and it is run by the Communist Party. Its impressive economic growth since embracing State Capitalism in 1986 has propelled it to be a clear contender to Western Hegemony. China is disinterested in both military interventions and experiments in the Middle East. All three powers have increasing energy needs that America and Russia can meet within their borders and China cannot, who therefore has elected to colonize every country in Africa. However, energy resources; oil and natural gas are the engines of both war and development.
America in 2017 has willing proxies in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. Its base for all Central Command, Military operations is in Qatar. The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, as some may recall. It mostly withdrew in 2011 but returned to contain ISIS in 2014. Saudi Arabia and all the Gulf States are Western oil clients, but all of them have intrinsic ties to the propagation of radical Islam.
Russia has a long-term client relationship with Syria and its only Mediterranean naval base there. Along with Crimea which it annexed in 2014 on the black sea, this is one of only two warm-water ports. The key Russian regional ally is Iran. Iran as a result of the American invasion of Iraq controls everything in Iraq that is not Iraqi Kurdistan, the Sunni Triangle, and the remains of the ISIS-held areas (Ar Raqqah, Anbar, Al-Hawijja, Deir-Ez-Zor). Most people here call them Daesh, the pejorative using the acronym.
For over 2/3rds of humanity, the very events critical to their respective, overlapping, and at times contradictory faiths took place in Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. For followers of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha’i, and numerous sub-sects of each, this is where their very prophets were all born, raised, and communicated with the source. From the very moment, according to their own religious texts, that the Israelites arrived out of Egypt there has never, except for several long authoritarian periods of Islamic Caliphate rule, been one even year of continuous peace. The Crusades were a several hundred-year series of barbaric attempts to establish a genocidal, white supremacist Roman Catholic foothold in an area only slightly larger than modern Israel. When not seeking to expand Islam into ¼ of the earth or repulsing Christian incursions; the Abbasids, the Umayyads, and the Ottomans were fighting constant wars with Mongol hordes, each other, or the long-running Sunni v. Shia wars.
There is nothing that can be written academically or rhetorically, presented on any medium to give the West or the East a new conscience. It is now a simple matter of public record that the developed world has accepted that the only obligations it has to the maldeveloped world is periodic mitigation. Famines, wars, floods, and disease epidemics are to be poorly managed by direct aid. Multilateral efforts through the United Nations are to be the extent of collaboration. NGOs will proliferate as donor trends determine. Regular military intervention will remove or shore up state systems intrinsically hostile to any of the three centers of global power; named Washington, Moscow and Beijing.
The World Wars and Cold War’s brought humanity closer than it ever has come to total self-destruction. But there was nothing particularly stable about the Pax-Americana from 1991 to 2001. The Russian and Chinese embrace of free-market capitalism has not altered in the slightest way how they maneuver as states toward their citizens and world. Albeit with fewer disasters, periods of social engineering. There is nothing particularly comforting about the Chinese hegemony when it fully arrives.
Consistent for nearly 100 years has been the Middle Eastern theater of a war that changes locations, ideologies, factions, and names. But it is all in fact a singular ongoing war.
If we accept the validity of real politics being intrinsically hostile and equity in the international order; if we excuse every type of growing human rights violation as explained in the national interest; the center cannot hold. The earth has only so much capacity for economic pillage. The weapons of war are exponentially more destructive. The exodus toward the West is overwhelming. We cannot prove broad conspiracy, nor do we have to. We cannot confirm or deny that something in human nature is self-interested, violent, and cruel. But we can truly verify a coherent, consistent willingness for wealthy nations to prey on the developing ones and keep them deliberately dependent and maldeveloped.
The Middle East has been in flames since 1919, and it is irresponsible to pretend that it has something to do with civilization, religion, or cultural clashes. It fundamentally has to do with two forces pushing from the East and the West toward an energy resource. But that is simplistic since both the United States and Russia have some of the largest proven reserves under their own territory. A Middle Eastern market for the weapons needed for constant warfare is a vital aspect. Both the Western and Eastern Blocs are seeking to control the oil in the ground and sell the dozens of Middle Eastern players’ advanced and simple tools for defense but mostly more killing. The various holy sites for the numerous religious believers convolute the basic thesis but are the third pillar of the equation. Were there no oil, there would be no willingness to arm so many opposing players. Observe Somalia where Muslims are in a desert and no Western powers really care until high-profile piracy occurs.
Were there no arms racing there could only be very small wars. Without political actors in Moscow as well as Washington, London and Berlin there could not be such a cauldron of bloodshed. There have been countless stated rationales for intervention, proxy arming, and invasion. It is nearly impossible to convince the democracies they ever did anything to escalate this. The war with the Islamic State has become a focal point, almost an obsession for everyone, but it is the latest manifestation of a long-running problem.
Before there was ever such a thing as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; the usual pundits and politicians screamed Cold War. Then East and West heavily armed everyone. Israel then tripled its landmass, Syria became the Russian proxy, and Egypt changed opportunistically sides. Next, they screamed about the containment of the Iranian Revolution rather than the West-armed Saddam Hussain. A gruesome eight-year war later Iraq genocided the Kurds. During this period to give the USSR their own Vietnam, the Saudis, Pakistanis, and Americans created Al-Qaeda and turned then Communist Afghanistan into the ungovernable Islamist warzone it is today. Then Saddam annexed Kuwait, and the West invaded. Several atrocities against Shi’a and Kurds later he remained in power. The pundits screamed loudest after September 11th, 2001, and the Global War on Terror began. Russian atrocities in Chechnya in the 1990s where one in four or seven Chechens was killed were replied to with the 2002 Beslan and 2004 Ord Nost Hostage crisis. Hundreds of innocent Russian hostages died in both events. An estimated 240,000 people had died in Chechnya in two wars that leveled the separatist state. Most regimes including Israel saw waves of protest in 2011 over domestic grievances and inequality during the Arab Spring. Virtually all regimes besides Tunisia quelled the uprisings. Civil War broke out in Libya and Syria. By 2014 Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria were all in total unrest, ashes, and anarchy. The corrupt military dictatorship of Egypt had been overthrown, then restored with U.S. intervention. Saudi Arabia and Iran were fighting proxy wars all over the region.
ABU HAMZA
“Turkey has clearly logistically enabled the creation of a Sunni-oriented, Wahhabi Salafist ultra-fundamentalist Jihadist entity which took the world by complete surprise. Saudi Arabia has long provided it with a hateful Sunni version of Islam. Qatari actors gave their sophisticated propaganda and branding. Pakistani intelligence coordinated it as they had in Yemen and Afghanistan14.”
Then, the so-called “Islamic State” took dozens of Syrian and Iraqi cities including Mosul, which had come dangerously close to taking Baghdad, before being turned back by Iranian coordinated militias and Kurdish Democratic Confederalists. The Peshmerga and the Iraqi military had fled in varying ways exposing civilians to atrocity. But allegedly quite a lot of these Sunni tribes people liked living under the Islamic State’s brand of non-state governance! It validated their identity; it gave them something big and powerful to believe in. But now they are near the brink of annihilation. It is not important to indict who thought up the Islamic State, and who planned it. Some say the Gulf States, some say Iran, Israel, and the West. The evidence though is clear that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar all fueled its development, and Pakistan has the only intelligence service capable of working out the variables. It is fucking childlike to believe it was created by Islamists and Ba’athist officers in U.S. custody.
It can be difficult to figure out what’s happening out here in the Middle East. It can become an abstraction of alien cultures, conflicts, and ethnic configurations that are easily blurred to an uncaring or untrained eye. It is hard to get your head around how the alleged cradle of human civilization became such an everlasting intractable bloodbath. Perhaps it is only the responsibility of the Western audience to know what is happening because the collateral of the carnage is spilling over into their European and American cities. No one will perhaps admit that, but yes. And it is also important to render the Middle East more human because the weapons distributed here are from the West or Russia. The oil being pumped is being bought and sold by Western or Russian firms. Most people living in the West don’t actually know what Kurdistan is, but that doesn’t say so much as most people in the West don’t know where a lot of things are. I would go so far as to say the majority don’t care.
Most probably won’t admit that they didn’t know that the Kurdish ethnic group existed until 2014. It was not until various pundits made it clear “the Kurds” were actively fighting the Islamic State did anyone ever hear about things like the Peshmerga, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), or about Kurds in general. The perversity and violence of ISIS kept it in the headlines for the past three years and the Kurdish issue has increasingly been at the forefront of understating geopolitics in the region.
Particularly because Iraqi Kurdistan, administered by the Kurdish Regional Government as an autonomous area since 2003 is set to hold its next referendum vote for independence on September 27th, 2017. And it is sitting on top of the fifth-largest proven crude oil reserve on earth. No one should totally wash their hands of what happens in the Middle East because its conflicts are fought with Western and Russian weapons, paid for by American and Russian tax dollars. The companies pumping out the oil are largely Western or Russian-based firms.
JUSTINE
There are in fact a lot of players, but all of them fall into four big tents; Western Allies led by the United States Military and Coalition forces. Russian Allies most prominently Syria and Iran. Gulf Sunni Client States claim they are Western Allies but can be linked to the Islamic State through one or two acts of deductive reasoning. And the 40 million Kurds spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The Kurds, who are the world’s largest stateless people are seeking some viable means to safeguard their long-abused community and of course, get rich off the oil under their Iraqi territory.
“I plan to be very repetitive with names and places that matter Heval!”
Or the places that have more than one name so the reader can try and learn them. There are a lot of overlapping players, a lot of acronyms, national interests, international interests, and underlying religious and ethnic antagonisms that go back thousands of years. There is a very long history of desert prophecy. This is certainly the land of Zoroaster, Abraham, Bab & Bahaullah (Iran); Moses (Egypt), Jesus (Israel/Palestine), and Muhammed (Saudi Arabia). Well documented and repetitive ethnic killing is the reality of life here for over 4,000 years punctuated by foreign occupations, colonies, and Islamic empires. Devastating foreign invasions on behalf of Mongolia and Europe altered the entire composition of the region; culturally, politically, and genetically. There is deep-rooted tribalism which has to be understood as a means of both loyalty and social organization. There are monarchies created by Europeans to crown their favored Bedouins as oil clients. There was the re-birth of the Jewish State for the third time in three thousand years. There was the re-birth of the revolutionary Shi’a State in Iran which carries a similar sense of Messianic optimism and zealous indoctrination to preserve for Shi’a what the Jewish one does for Jews. There is absolutely a more recent history since 1947 of several large and also small wars and protracted atrocities. Such as those experienced by the Palestinians at the hands of almost everyone in the region. You could rightfully say with a straight face that since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1919; there has been a constant war playing out inside every single country in the region.
The Western Media’s linguistic and cultural detachment from these antagonistic protagonists borders on being crude Orientalism. An anti-Islamism mixed with a thirst for covering and sensationalizing bloodshed. The fact that suicide bombs are regularly going off in Western cities has made everything more immediate, more visceral. But it is undeniable now that some of the biggest beneficiaries of being Western petrol-colony clients (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman) can be linked to funding and supporting Wahhabi Salafist doctrines when not being caught outright funding the Islamic State. Frankly, enduring miserable heat doesn’t help anything. While obsessing, that is the word I would use; obsessing about the regions 5 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians of Greater Israel, West Bank and Gaza take up a lot of printed word on the subject. The enduring issue, the issue that everyone needs to become more fluent in, is the question of Kurdistan.
Beyond the wars, the ceaseless violence and the conservative, most intolerant, male-dominated nature of Middle Eastern society in general; and Arab, Kurdish and Persian society in particular. All anthropological and political variants are made worse by what I would call claustrophobia. A feeling of being trapped in small spaces disguised as holy lands with nowhere to really go. Or fear of impending genocide, which affects all the players out here, and there are many. As I did not write this article for academics, let me paint with broad brushstrokes a paragraph on demographics.
ABU HAMZA
There are 35-40 million Kurds mostly spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. They are mostly Sunni Muslims., There are two primary types of Muslims; Sunni and Shi’a which differ in a range of practices and beliefs but are mostly divided over who was the rightful successor of the Prophet Muhamad. The Shi’a declare it was Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali and have been historically persecuted by the Sunni caliphates and rulers. Sunni Islam, which is the majority sectarian faction of global Islam (say 70-90%) Shi’ism is the smaller (say 10-20%) faction of the Ummah or Global Muslim community which is about 1/3 of humanity.
Kurds are also the world’s largest stateless people. Linguistically, culturally, spiritually, and often militarily Kurds are a great deal like Persians.
The nation of Iran has been a Revolutionary Shiite Islamic State since 1979, and is about 65% Persian, or say 50% of its 80 million people. There are also 9-10 million Kurds living there. While they are certainly not free from Iranian Sharia law; they are generally better treated than everywhere else in their historic lands of settlement. In Iraq, a genocide called Anfal happened in 1988 which brutally killed 180,000 Kurds. In Turkey Kurds and Turks have been in an open civil war since 1984. In Syria, Arabization campaigns and forced resettlement made them third-class citizens. Iran had an anti-Western, anti-Shah revolution in 1979. The United States promptly armed U.S. client Saddam Hussain to the teeth. Then sold guns secretly to Iran in the Iran-Contra Affair. While North Korea, Libya, and Israel all sold arms and secretly advised the Iranians. An 8-year war occurred in the style of World War I with trenches and poison gas where over a million people were killed. In the last days of the war, Saddam Hussain ordered Al-Anfal or the systematic killing of 180,000 Kurdish Iraqis.
The nation that used to be Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussain and the Ba’ath Party until 2003 when the US successfully “liberated” it.Only the Kurds would call it liberation as both the Shi’a and Sunni Iraqi Arabs both for the most part utterly hate the United States. The Shi’a have gained the most politically speaking. The Ba’ath party which was nominally Arab-Socialism but really a one-man dictatorship is also found in Syria. It is the political party of President Bashar al-Assad, who is an Alawite, but we will come back to that. It is certainly neither irrational nor poorly documented that historically everyone out here has at one point tried to annihilate each other. As most of the groups out here have at one point or are actively today trying to obliterate each other. None of this is helped by the obvious fact that the biggest Western powers & Russia cannot and will not allow control of natural resources under Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States to go unspoken for. Or be nationalized. Or be made inaccessible by virtually endless conflict.
Sometime around 0300-0400 there were mechanized sounds, the rumbling of the Hord, the incursion advancing. Followed by death from above. The coalition airstrikes light up the wastelands. These Cheta scum, these ISIS bandits are blown apart just sixteen kilometers from the outer most ring road. Unbeknownst to them the city was virtually defenseless, all the Pesh Merga and most of the civilians had fled. If not for the aggressive Coalition airstrikes Erbil would have fallen to Isis in mere hours.
S C E N E (VI)
بغداد
BAGHDAD, Iraq, 2018ce
***
NADIA ‘ANYA LAYLA’ SHUBAR NOORI AL BEIRUTI
“THE OLDEST SONG EVER SUNG EVER WAS A LOVE SONG” plays on the satellite radio. I need to find the red-light room in the Green Zone. The place off duty soldiers gets lap dances, drop dollars and get their dicks wet.
I lie awake in my family apartments in the Green Zone of Baghdad, and I tell you it’s much harder to get out of here than I ever thought. I have jet black hair and a baby face. Shabab15like it. I’m a Shi’a bombshell, but I never feel that pretty. I feel mostly empty, living in a repressive culture with repressive heat and violence. I feel wilted. I feel confined. I rarely go anywhere without four armed men with beards. Sebastian the Jew tells me I am “powerful”, but I do not feel very powerful lately. Although they say I have tits for days. My name is Nadia Shubar Noori. Some friends, all me Nadia Night, i.e. Nadia Layla. My father is an Iraqi politician in a moderate Shi’a faction called AMAL. I think he was doing something for Hezbollah16 in Lebanon, I do not have a profoundly serious opinion about this faction or that faction, and I’m just 19! My boyfriend is a Kurd. And I am Arab, so that must be kept quiet. Mostly because I am high class, and he is working class. My mother has developed an exiles taste for fine things. We have a chandelier and some fancy carpets. There is always meat in the supper and fruit in the fridge. I spent most of my life in Beirut, but emotionally I’m coming of age in Erbil where I met my first love who is Kurdish. I had lovers all over Erbil, but now just this one guy. His name is Alacan al-Biban, he’s so, so cool. He’s a Kirkuki. I am not so libertine in Bagdad. I have crazy person dreams. I have bold visions! I am, however, deeply unhappy in Erbil, it is like a guiled bird cage. When my mother moved us to Baghdad it became much worse. Baghdad is of course a much larger, much more sectarian city. You can get your ass kidnapped. There are less eligible bachelors. Sex is the kind of satisfaction that can get your mind off an existential crisis. So, when I became a young woman, I lost track of my happiness and my sleep. I am of course a liberated woman and artistic as well.
Sebastian Adonaev tried to give me an art lesson, but I didn’t take that many notes. I just liked watching him do his thing. Except when he finally made it to Syria and doing that part of his thing is scary. But prophetically I knew he would probably survive the civil war.
Sebastian told me that the dreams I had are “prophecies”. He’s quite nice. He is a good mix of a gentleman and a tumultuous revolutionary. We were never ever lovers, but he spoke sometimes about running away with me after the war to Beirut and I agreed it was “a possible”. But the war will never ever end so it’s a very silly notion. He says that in the old country you cannot elope unless you’re half a person’s age, plus seven. I’m 19 though, so he says we have to wait until I’m 26, but he’s not that old. He’s 34. It’s not such a big deal. I am very bored in the Green Zone. Alacan al-Biban wants to fly me back to Erbil, but ever since the hordes of Shi’a Militia men called the Popular Mobilization Forces17 began surrounding Kirkuk, Alacan al-Biban has been stressed and distracted.
Probably getting involved in Workers Party activities, but to me he hardly admits such things to me or over social media. Later, I had a cafe talk date with my friend Mina Abdul Rahim.
Alacan al-Biban is such a fucking sweetheart. He’s an artist and a radical and I like him a lot. Sebastian and Alacan al-Biban are close friends I realized after the fact. As my flirtatious older male Kafr18friend, Sebastian writes me every other day from Syria. He’s my sweet infidel always being optimistic to me on the WhatsApp. We had a jazz date and a drawing date and then I never saw him again. But he is a writer, so he writes a lot. Our brief window to do something inappropriate, well it was missed. I let him sext me from the front and don’t tell Alacan al-Biban of course. I don’t sext too far back, I just don’t stop him. But I agree that for posterity I ought to share the Shi’a visions I’m having. These flashes of Ali and such. Not to freak anyone out, but I might just be the real deal. I might just be triggered into revelation amid this shit show of war. Though you tell the wrong person that stuff, you can get out right stoned to death or lit on fire. Or thrown off a roof. Or get stoned to death, or get their hands cut off.
You see, on side of the Middle east is art, math, reason, love and science. On the other, unseen hateful gods and howling hordes of death, with black banners, or red, white and blue ones. On one side is hope, constructive collaboration, pride, and honor. On the other bullets whizzing, bombs dropping; bodies piling up. One person sees Djinn, another G-d, and yet another knows its nanobots.
If you realize how hard I get fucked later in this series, you will fully understand though these messages come from djinn not from gods, not from some righteous source. And djinn is just a primitive interpretation of what we now know to be superior alien military, aka nanobots.
***
Everyone is familiar with the Iranian Israeli shadow war over Iranian nuclear acquisition. Less publicized is the Iranian Israeli shadow war over nano-bot technology. The itty-bitty war inside.
It started innocently enough, with Mina Adul Rahim experimenting in her lab, fine-tuning the algorithms that governed the behavior of her nanobots. She marveled at their ability to navigate intricate mazes, dismantle complex structures, and even repair damaged tissues within living organisms. But as her mastery over the technology grew, so too did her ambition.
With a few lines of code, Mina found herself able to exert control over swarms of nanobots, directing their movements with precision. She could command them to assemble into intricate patterns, mimic the behavior of biological organisms, or disperse like a cloud of dust. It was a heady sensation, knowing that she held such power in the palm of her hand.
But power, as Mina soon discovered, was a double-edged sword. As she pushed the boundaries of what her nanobots could do, she began to realize the potential dangers they posed. In the wrong hands, they could be used to wreak havoc on a global scale—unleashing plagues, destabilizing economies, or even manipulating minds.
Haunted by the ethical implications of her work, Mina wrestled with her conscience. Should she continue down this path, knowing the potential consequences? Or should she destroy her research, before it falls into the wrong hands? Such as the warlike Israelites.
In the end, Mina made a choice that would shape the course of history. She resolved to use her knowledge for the greater good, to ensure that her nanobots would be a force for healing rather than harm. But even as she vowed to control her creations, she knew that the true challenge lay in controlling herself. For in the world of nanotechnology, the line between creator and creation was a perilously thin one, and only time would tell where it would lead.
S C E N E (VII)
تلأبيبתלאביב–יפו
TEL AVIV, State of Israel, 2001ce
***
Something is playing on repeat. I am back in the year 2001.
El Al flight 510 touches down at Lod International Airport on May 9, 2001, at exactly 15:04 Israeli time. Which is usually on time, but then makes you wait a long time. After someone is inevitably rude to you. The passengers on the plane start clapping as the wheels hit the tarmac. Many of the passengers are evidently very happy to be home, and happier still that the Palestinians didn’t manage to hijack or ‘explode’ the plane. Someone whispers that things had gotten much worse in the weeks leading up to Independence Day. There had been two bombings the week before. The second Palestinian Intifada has blown the top off the kettle.
“Welcome to Israel,” the flight attendant tells us. She gives the date, time, and weather in Hebrew and then repeats it in thickly accented English, and then once again in Arabic, which is the second national language. English lettering is below all the Hebrew/Arabic signs because America foots the bill around here.
SEBASTIAN ADONAEV
We descend onto the tarmac from the hatchway in the back of the plane. I have an urge to bend down and kiss the ground, but I do not. It is not very dignified something tells me, a voice inside that once had a name. It is brutally hot. I am wearing my kosher, blue pinstripe suit. I am glad I left my Kashmir trench coat in Spain. I stop for a moment and cover my eyes, lowering my head.
“Shema Yisrael Adonai Elohanynu, Adonai EhHad.” This is the only prayer I can remember that would make any sense on this occasion. Also, the only prayer I remember at all.
The revolution had failed me completely. But I knew I had also failed it. I had been misguided. The staunch atheism that the Family School had instilled in me for a time seemed to have been shattered by my last three weeks in Golder’s Green. Rabbi Tatz had opened a door for me only to have it slammed in my face when Rabbi Gabi declared that I wasn’t’ a real Jew. As I stared out the open window of the cab I saw the green fields of my people’s land blooming, highways filled with compact cars, and new buildings being erected everywhere. I was home and ready. Babylon was behind me. There was no longer a need to struggle needlessly. Believing in things that can never possibly exist.
***
All of Tel Aviv is bouncing off the hashemdamn walls. The streets are filled with loud and pushy people. There are beautiful women with olive skin and manly guys with tight t-shirts and jeans. They are all drunk or on the way down that road. Everyone has a gun and a flag. It is Israeli Independence Day and Israel had just won the basketball championship against all of Europe. I have never seen so many beautiful girls in my life. Tel Aviv was wild and free like New York on a beach. They may have driven us into the sea with gas and bullets in Europe but now we struck back with basketball and, well really fucking attractive women. The basketball win is a little hard to believe, but it made me happy we were winning where ever we could win. The racist in me asserted that Ethiopians had been put in charge of the team. Some girl told me they had just recruited a bunch of American Blacks. Even better.
I check into a hostel on Kikar Dizengoff or DizengoffSquare. An elevated platform supported a white sculpture fountain with interlocking-colored disks in the middle of the square. It was like a Union Square of the Middle East with more junkies and less skaters. The hostel smelled like radio deodorant-free Europe. I was in a coed dorm room with twelve bunk beds. My bunkmates were mostly South Africans. Afrikaans is the ugliest language I have ever heard. I changed out of my suit, showered, and decided to go exploring. I grabbed a street map from the front desk and wandered out into the bustling, raucous Ben Yehuda Street, which I hoped would lead to the beach.
There was a rally going on in the square for the union which controlled Egged Buses, one of the two major government-owned lines. Groups of teenagers were spending time together and drinking in public, which I am told is legal here. A group of Russian punks gave me some unbelievably cheap vodka, and I slammed it back. I drew them a picture of a punk with a shotgun mashing. They gave me more vodka but did not speak a word of English. There was a large movie theatre on a corner of the square. What looks like a huge and shady motel occupied another corner under a huge red neon sign that says KDA. Hebrew is spoken everywhere or Russian. I am enthralled and overwhelmed. It is almost too much to take in. The signs and language keep reminding me the land is ours. The cute girls with stacks of party flyers remind me that it’s not just another Friday night; it’s the biggest party night of the year.
Eventually I wound my way down to the beach. It’s an endless strip of mini skyscrapers, hotels highway and the boardwalk, called the tiyeled. Itis the land of see-and-be-seen, play-and-get-hustled, hoot, holler and dance. Little wooden pergolas and stone benches run miles in either direction. It’s on the coast of the Mediterranean, but it’s more like Vegas than Nice. Everything is all lit up in a hundred shades of red or blue and there is live music being performed on mini stages along the way, mostly salsa and house music. I stand below a huge white terraced structure called the Opera Tower and look down at the main strip from Hof Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Beach. Some came to the Holy Land for that broken down wall locked up in the mountains, but I like my pilgrimages to end by the beach with a cocktail. Cars fly by with Israeli flags flapping out the windows. The occupants are yelling on the top of their lungs blasting Arabic sounding music from their vehicles. Everybody keeps offering me shots. Every crew and their Russian girl friends have multiple bottles of vodka and hookah set up for the fireworks show about to light up the beach.
As I walked further down the boardwalk, halfway to drunk by now, I encountered every manner of hustler, hawker, pusher, and thief. Children selling flashy neon toys. Eastern European émigrés hustling the tourists at games of three-card Monty lured in by a cute Romanian girl that keeps winning and might just be the dealer’s lady. Tables set up selling trinkets, selling temporary tattoos, selling smokes, selling girls who sell the smokes and not a single street artist in sight. Or copper for that matter. I decided not to set up tonight. It’s the Shabbos on top of Independence Day and Victory over Europe. Rabbi Tatz said I would learn to carry out the mitzvahs gradually. But then Rabbi Gabbi said I wasn’t a Jew, so why I kept referencing those Jews of the Green was beyond me. The Israeli government counts you as a Jew if a single grandparent was Jewish. This is surely better odds than having a halachically-converted Jewish mother.
I hear a South African saying that it was good they let these not quite Jewish Ruskies in because with the uprising going on in, it was unwise to let the Palestinians cross the green line to work like dogs in all the jobs the Jews don’t want. Half the Russians I was drinking with had gold crucifixes come to think of it. Guess they had a Jewish grandparent before Communism made them Orthodox Christians or whatever-the-hell they are.
I’m happy to be reunited with my Noblisse cigarettes. I remembered hoping they came in menthol when I first found them in the ubiquitous cigarette machines. They aren’t that bad for smoke which cost six shekels. That’s just over $1.50. Thank G-d for no more TOP rollies. These are Israel’s general-purpose cigarettes. They are the cheapest cigarettes you can buy when you’re poor. They are also smoked by the kibbutzniks, because if you live on kibbutz, you’re inherently poor. The Russians don’t smoke them. They smoke something only a little better called L & M, which feels more like a cheap Marlboro Light.
With my sketchpad and accented-English flying, I befriend a Russian named Roman along with his car, his bottle of Russian Standard, and his three lady friends. I take off in this former Soviet stranger’s car, a Roman who “knows where the nature party is up country” “Not that much country it very small place” he tells me grinning. “Good looking girls. Good party”. “At a good party you can forget about everything.” So, I ended up staying in Tel Aviv in the arms of a wild little Russian sweet thing named Anya for nearly a week before I ended up making moves north.
It’s funny how for such a small place you can wake up so many times with so many different memories.
And then it hit me. This was definitely not my first time in Israel. And the year, the actual year, was not 2001. Not by any stretch of imagination.
Roman is dead. Anya is dead. I am dead too and this place at least how it keeps repeating in a vivid dream, it too is gone.
But I drink the Vodka and in gives me a rush. I feel the night breeze. I taste Anyas lips. And the dream of it, the memory of this dead place is more pleasant in every single way than the war to the death in the real world that we are all still fighting in.
S C E N E (VIII)
ديرعزالزور
Der Ez-Zor, Syria, 2017ce
Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria
***
Flaming, low-lying wreckage spreads out before us in every direction. The ruins of an already desolated land. Sprawling two-story compounds along a mighty river. Pock marked with rifle rounds. Misery found everywhere. Syria is now a byword for total warfare, over 600,000 have so far died. A Revolution in a Civil War. A Third World War using several dozen proxy armies is underway. Russia, Iran, China, America, and Europe all have their boots on the ground. In Northern Syria, an unrecognized administration in three cantons protects 4 million civilians and internal refugees. A Kurdish lead project for democracy, ethnic pluralism, women’s empowerment, and something called ‘social ecology’. The sun bakes you and the dust gets into absolutely everything.
HEVAL CHIYA19
In Deir Ez-Zor Province, a wasteland along the North bank of the Euphrates, in a few hundred hamlets, from their ‘capitals’ in Raqqa and Mosul, Iraq the most hateful and radical of Islamic fascists rules over 10 million persons. Some happily embrace its Caliph Baghdadi as the fulfillment of prophecy. Over 50,000 Muslim Jihadists from around the world arrived to reinforce this effort. At its maximum the Islamic State occupied massive swaths of Eastern Syria and Northwestern Iraq, threatening to capture Baghdad and Damascus.
Deir Ez-Zor was one of the very first Syrian cities in 2011 to stage large scale demonstrations against the Assad Regime. In 2014 ISIS took over the city with little resistance leaving only a small pocket of pro-Assad military and over 100,000 civilian supporters cut off in an airbase and small section of the city. Supplied by helicopters and high altitude drop services, the besieged garrison deep inside the ISIS control zone resisted capture for over 3 years and 2 months.
The siege of Deir Ez-Zor Airbase garrison lasted an exceedingly long time. ‘Daesh’ controlled everything except a small military airport which the Russians and Regime supplied by air for all of the war, but could not re-take, along with the city until just a month ago when it was “liberated” on 3rd November 2017 by the SAA and the Russians.
At some point the Regime soldiers made the local women trade sex for basic rations of food. There were rarely sympathetic forces in the war, besides ours. But even if the Y.P.G. is conscripting children, forcing Arabs off their lands, and dabbling in occasional war crimes from time to time, to time. Now, on the South bank, Assad Regime forces, Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary guards and Russian special forces push southeast down the southern bank of the river while Syrian Democratic Forces and United States lead coalition forces pushed rapidly south to the Euphrates North bank, both sides maneuvering to secure the majority of the Syrian oil fields. The S.D.F. capture most of them. Now we slowly begin the final offensive to capture Isis’s last strongholds, moving down the river toward Hajin. Trying not to kick off World War Three.
“Perhaps I am not where I am supposed to be,” muses Heval Ciya, “Perhaps here, I will die for nothing useful at all. We can be killed so easily by anything, then they will dance about with my corpse making speeches in Kurmanji for a day, until my death takes on significance that it probably never had.” It seems like every other day; a man wanders off and steps on something and explodes. The mines are everywhere, can’t be understated. You should try to never walk anywhere you have never seen someone else walk.
Heval Ciya Zinar is the name they gave me. “Comrade Friend Mountain Rock”. I am a separatist minded Scottish Soldier. Although still a member of the British army, I voted for independence in our latest failed referendum. I am a gentleman by most accounts and a Y.P.G. International Volunteer. I have no political sympathies with the Kurdish lead formations, though I possess formal military training, making me more valuable than most of these preachy, useless ideologically motivated volunteers.
“There’s dust in my beard and men die all around me!” exclaims Heval Ciya from Scotland.
As we grew closer to the Euphrates, we could see fire in the sky and the night is lit up with heavy coalition airstrikes somewhere far away to the south. The convoy of nine trucks had left Al Hasakah20, the largest rebel held city in the morning and drove about five hours south toward some forward operating base. The eight of us internationals had not been issued weapons until halfway to the front. We stopped of course several times for obligatory tea and some volleyball. The sport of ‘Apoist’ revolution. Sometimes we’d stop at what seemed like the same identical storefront kiosk, next to well stocked pharmacies. The road bodega of Kurdistan is stocked with energy drinks, smokes, and Turkish day to day items, never toilet paper. All the toilet paper in Syria was now gone. There we bought energy drinks and cigarettes of a more potent type, as the party issued Ardens were lights or ultra lights at best. There were tons of canned Pepsi, but no Coca-Cola throughout the liberated zones. Real freedom evidently has not been won yet.
In the first battle that I participated in during the Syrian Civil War five Arab soldiers in our S.D.F./ Y.P.G. Unit were blown to bits by mines and mortars as we stormed the river basin a little after midnight. Evidently, there were far more Daesh entrenched than we had thought. From a dirt sand trench, I fired my AK-47 shiftlessly over the wall, peaking out I saw an Arab comrade ripped apart by gun fire and collapse in the sand.
The fire fight resumed immediately after a short re-calibration of the battle plan, after Heval Commander Dalil’s men were buried. A larger number of Kasadeh21were trucked in, barely trained. Half or more might have fought for Daesh or the Regime at some point. Child soldiers all over the place. A major conscription drive happened, even some cadro tabors were moved in. This was a race to secure as much turf north of the Euphrates as we could as quickly as we could, creating a defensible buffer against the regime, Russians and Iranians to secure the oil fields. Of course, implicit in all that was to finish Daesh for good. Smash their final positions along 60 to 100 hamlets and miserable dust cake boney towns leading to Hajin, for the very last stand of the caliphate.
Very bad intelligence friends! The bandits were still very well dug in, refugees were swarming out and among them suicide bombers. Five so far. it was impossible to know anymore who was Daesh or not among the refugees flooding out. Some two dozen Arab Hevals were martyred the first night of the operation. We were down to the hardcore of the elite, the foreign fighter zealots, their families. Motorcycles with snipers affixed to reposition. Sleeper cell deployment, suicide bombers, booby traps, tunnel mines, the usual. Now they would in four battalions capture about fifty tiny key destitute towns working south in several prongs toward the river.
“If you see a helicopter, don’t shoot at it!” Dalal had said, it was our new resupply drop copters. We allegedly had a very, very small air force now. “Do not shoot at the helicopters in general,” was repeated several times in Arabic and Kurdish. “Also, also! If the regime forces fire, return fire, but do not engage them. Unless they cross the river. Declared Commander Heval Brusk, which means ‘commander lightning’. Commander lightning then personally presided over a few hours on conscript drills. None of these bearded partisans were trusted with grenades.
So, the very next day, at early dawn, ten of the destitution ridden little seemingly strategic ISIS hamlets were again stormed. There was chaotic gun fire erupting everywhere. There were utterly ransacked two story brown buildings all unfinished, all about the same shattered look. From several positions Takim22commandos were firing endlessly from roof tops and sniper holes out toward where it was believed the enemy was hiding. A mosque about half a kilometer away. Well of course every Daesh position was in a mosque, hospital or granary since nothing else was defensible. This was a mostly one-sided AK-47 and mortar barrage. Much of the war had proceeded like this, pickup trucks dripping light infantry to storm abandoned Arab homes and light up anything that moved. Loot absolutely anything that wasn’t made of sand and carry it back north. One pipe, one water basin, one carpet at a time. A small child runs out into the road and is blown away. Briefly a pause, until he is clearly limp and dead. A day or two more of endless AK fire, sometimes at night too. Eventually the Americans were told to bomb the mosque. Spotters transmit grid coordinates. Soon, about 5 minutes later an airstrike rips apart the mosque. Battle won!
Many people have written at length about “how boring” it can be to be at war, but it is more terrifying than boring, Heval. You do your best to not think about how men and women far more prepared than yourself took a wrong turn and then just exploded. Or how a sniper cut them down. Or how they died in a Turkish airstrike. Or contracted hepatitis because of poor local appreciation of pooping with toilet paper and hand washing, then eating.
“The boredom of war Heval is perhaps a cover for a sneaking debilitating fear. A pervasive feeling you will not make it out alive,” so that is what people sometimes write about who write about war. Being bored, instead of often being afraid. And in a war, such as this certainly you sit around quite a lot drinking tea, smoking weak Party issued cigarettes and standing guard. Or looking for strategic places to jerk off or poop without setting off a mine. But nothing for us was the same for very long and thus all the time you spent sitting around was better spent ‘conversating’ on the Revolution’s bleak future, or studying some Kurdish, or horsing around with the Arabs. Who loved to try and communicate actually. And show you pornography and awkwardly try and steal, trade for or buy your hand grenades. Or ask you to bring them to America or Europe hidden in a bag. Jokes abound, but really it is only you who will be brought back to Europe or America in a bag. While very few of us spoke any real Kurmanji Kurdish23 or Arabic, it seemed that the Arabs were far more interested in us than the Kurds though. I would call the Kurdish commander’s attitude, begrudging appreciation and that of the rank-and-file borderline insulting. I would go so far as to say that at this stage in the war, being fought in majority Arab zones now by the Euphrates River that an increasing number of the front-line fighters were Kasadeh24, non-Kurdish Arab S.D.F. fighters. The Assyrians too had a small group, less than a few hundred men, many little kids and old men. Many poorly trained and poorly paid semi conscripts. Many were not even very against the Islamic State, more eager to shoot at the Russians and regime forces on the other side of the river. With the Kadros25being withheld in clear preparation for the impending defense of Afrin Canton.
In retrospect I assume that Heval Fermander Dalil26 probably saved our lives by abandoning us in a rear fox hole in the dead of night. The ten internationalists that I was aware of were placed further back in the rear, but Heval Shervan ‘the crazed Irish gypsy’ commandeered a Humvee and caught us up, without any invitation to the troops of “Fermander Dalil”.
I remember freezing out in the dunes all night long while the Arab fighters shared neither bedding nor blanket. It was so bitterly G-d damn cold! Sometimes Heval Kawa, the idealistic New Yorker, and I talk about the girls back home. I will talk about my Ms. Ashley. He talks about his “Goldy”. Some escort Russian he has some arty muse thing with. Pretty much this is what men at war do. Although in my case, I motorboated my female best friend. In his case it seems a bit more fucking dark and tragic.
“Sometimes I close my eyes and remember your lips. Late into the long trip back to Brighton to your so-called home. I have no home, only ugly little flats around Brooklyn soviet which I rent out of poverty, artless and shared. Decorated with trinkets. I’ll never go back! To you or to Russia, or Haiti, nor to Mehanata the tavern or even dear Cuba! All these things are a form of slavery now. Your lingering Daria, it takes the form of ruminations on WhatsApp messages telling me to “come home”. But to what? To nothing. Life here is hard, but it is free life as they say.”
Kawa, the so-called American, is more a poet than a medic in his heart of hearts. Me? I am simply a Scottish warrior. I long for the fight and I got some.
I was deployed into the Deir Ez-Zor Province wastelands about ten days ago to the front near Omar, Daesh is nearly completely defeated they say, but every day we are taking martyr bodies back to Al-Hasaka. Assigned briefly to the Tabor Shahid Lawrence; we lost fifty men in the first few battles to advance south on the mighty Euphrates River. After all that initial death it seems they aim to break up our group of internationalists into different places. They do not want us all to die at once. They do not really seem to have achieved consensus or a plan on where we should be or when and if we should die, or what we are even good for. Or what to do when ISIS is finished, and America abandons them, and the Turkish Army rolls over the border to kill us all. A heated internal debate is constantly held in both Turkish and Kurdish. Sometimes also in Arabic. Which always ends inconclusively. Well, its a complex matter anyway. So many ways to die out here for the greatest cause of our time.
On this matter Kawa and I agree that whatever motives brought us all to this wasteland, this place of dying and suffering over made up Gods and ideologies, invented ethnicities and World War three style great power politics; this was the resistance of the age. This was a battle between good men, bad men and crazy men who could not sit out. Because when the smoke clears there will be a different Middle East, a different world. I am no ideologue. I am no dreamer or religious fanatic. I am a professional soldier. While it is not unreasonable to say the Assad Regime backed by Russia and Iran, the Turks, Al Qaeda and of course the Daesh, are unequivocal forces of religious fanatical reaction, of fascism, or totalitarianism and death, well they are. While the Kurds and Arabs of Y.P.G./Y.P.J./S.D.F. are not saints of course. We are not angels here to help do some God’s work. We are fighting for democracy, feminism, ecology and tolerance in the heart of the Middle East. As opposed to all the other groups that are fighting for radical Islam, chauvinism, fascism and the right to impose the will of the minority on the majority.
“Did you know that when you take off a person’s uniform to bury them, you cannot tell a fascist corpse, from a democratic corpse, from a Daesh corpse, not even from the length of the beard?”
Those three and letter affiliations, they do not matter anyway. It matters more, the stuff inside a person’s heart. Their moral compass. Not the length of the beard or who they pray to. Not the historic struggle of their people or their claim to the rivers. When true warriors die, they might not end up anywhere glorious. They might just be dead. The “immortality” we are achieving in our death here is thus rooted in the way the story is framed. Which is to say, whoever wins the war. But can you really win a revolution inside a civil war, inside a World War? I see no good ending in sight. We will all get killed ingloriously. But there is of course a timeless epic glory for young men of all cultures to join an impossible battle, risk their lives and join a pantheon of immortal heroes. Of course, the Arabs, Assyrians, Kurds, Turks, Chechens, Turkmen, Persians and all the other micro-ethnic tribes gathered here to make war, well they sadly all have no choices. These are the oil rich, strategic holy lands and mountains they were cursed perhaps by their gods to be born in.
How did we even get here? How did this motley group of around 800 mostly Western foreigners take up the cause of Kurdistan?
Well, it began with a letter of introduction. As well as four short pamphlets that were written by the Uncle Leader himself, while serving twenty-one years in solitary confinement on the Turkish prison island of Imrali. These pamphlets attempt to paraphrase thousands and thousands of handwritten theoretical documents smuggled out by his lawyers from Imrali. The name if this 8-volume treatise are called alternatively “Democratic Confederalism” or “the Defenses of Abdullah Ocalan.” Taken as a body of ideology these writings translated into Kurmanji, Sorani, German, French, English, Spanish and Farsi from Turkish for the theoretical basis for the military and political objectives of the Party.
S C E N E (IX)
بيروت
Beirut, Corniche, 2023ce
***
The historical, comical, and even anecdotal way you know “the Jew is back in Beirut”is his appearance at Monir’s on the most Western reach of the Corniche way into Ras Beirut. The very most western point of the Corniche is the literal turning point on the people’s boardwalk stretching dozens of kilometers where you begin to leave Western Sunni Beirut and enter southwest Shi’a Beirut. Tracksuits and mustaches. Shiite tricks and the of twelve Palestinian refugee camps.
Did I hear you say, “a Jew is back in Beirut?!With any surprise in my voice?” explains Monir Senior, the owner of the Fruits of the Sea Restaurant. If he is back, well, great trouble is coming.
“There are at least 40 Jews still in Beirut!” says a man who looks like could be in Hamas or could just be a regular Middle-aged Sunni. Hamas is Arabic for Zeal; and is the infamous Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood that has just orchestrated the action of October 7th; in which 1,200 Israelis lost their lives in Jihad. The man has a bulge in his suit for a shooter to perch. He has a shabby suit. “Which is 40 too many if you ask me!”
“There are not 40! Just 25, and all loyal Lebanese to the core.”
“The Party of God just agreed to help pay for the great synagogue renovations!” exclaims someone in Hezbollah having their late lunch with a deluge of tea and cigarettes.
“Paid for by Iran!” The Hamas man yells back.
The Jew was made familiar with the Monir family having served with his son in the Mosul Offensive of 2017, and thus the Monir Shop was the one familiar lynchpin the Jew ever has, tying the world of alive and now, to the world of endless and ephemeral. The speculative world he uniquely and often peers into. He is of course “capable of becoming a blue-purple smoke and then he’s gone! They say the Jew has great powers. That is what they always say for sure. Power to steal and to heal, with mere words.”
They say “the Jew always appears in a green suit, in a pop and puff and mystical whiff of blue-purple smoke. Out of nowhere!” And so has now in the dead of winter. Which in Beirut means one minute it is sunny beach weather, and the next a torrential down pour flooding the roads putting cars under water. The Jew sits in the middle of the room amid everybody’s tables, so everyone can see his face. And a little light goes on.
SEBASTIAN ADONAEV
“Now looking back, the first thing I should have done was walk into Monir’s on the Corniche, ask the manager for the owner, and tell him I fought with his son Monir during the Isis wars.”
His son Monir Jr. and I were part of a special international tabor attached to the Iraqi Special Forces units in the battle of Mosul. We used to patch up the varying combatants and civilians blown apart in the crossfire. Stabilize them until they can get extracted 10 or 20 km away toward a distant field hospital. Usually NGO, WHO, or Shiite Hashidashabi Popular Mobilization Forces field hospitals. Unless we found the bruises under the right arm, from firing a Kalashnikov, and we’d know they were Isis and they’d be snatched off the operating table to be tortured or summarily shot in the head and then dumped in the river. Monir is Christian Lebanese; his family is Maronite. We used to spend our leave time in outer ring Erbil flirting with Iranian prostitutes but being too broke to pay for one.
The salary for an internationalist volunteer in a tabor is $250 a month in faceless dinar, with unlimited Arnette or sometimes Gauloise cigarettes, three square Iraqi collective meals eating with your hands; and “a place at the table with Jesus” as Monir used to say.
Now any friend of Monir the Jr. was a friend for the life of Monir the Senior, but I never even opened my mouth in Monir’s except to ask for a menu and order some seafood stew. And a Coke, but there is only Pepsi in Lebanon! Any idiot knows that. Why was the Jew making such culturally insensitive rookie mistakes? Maybe he is nervous? Maybe it’s just performance anxiety?
You can tell the coming weather of winter by the appearance of the Jew. Is he being rushed by something? Why does he order a Coke, there’s no Coke in Lebanon. Does he make a war fellow embrace Monir Jr, working in the Kitchen? Is he in the Kitchen in this reality? Is Monir still studying in Australia? Does he sit with a stranger inviting him for a smoke? Does he sit on the right with Hamas or the left with Hezbollah? Is he going to get kidnapped and cut into lots of little pieces?
HAMAS MEN
“Gotta get a good look at his face to tell the coming weather.”
So, when the Jew sits down, they turn on a little light. Not too bright. Because the Jew comes to Beirut every single year and he may have evolved. How much blue smoke? What kind of shoes? What makes this new green suit? Is he dressed like PKK again? What’s PKK again? The Kurdish resistance of Qandil; the Kurdistan Workers Party that trained him. Well, it looks like it was rushed and sloppy training if you ask the Party of God.
This year, in 2024; at least most agree to that. The Jew doesn’t make small talk or reunion with Monir Senior. Shockingly he seems to ignore everything. Who is or isn’t even at the restaurant? The Jew doesn’t seem to care about establishing the human connection. He seems rushed, and they all agree. In the Middle East only a foreigner is ever rushed.
“The Jew of Beirut is out of season.” No one even knew he was coming this, Winter. No one even suspected it. He asks for a cigarette from a patron who obliges him. A neutral. He doesn’t make eye contact with the Hamas men, or the Hezbollah men. “My son is an electrical engineer in Massachusetts,” says the man he bummed the original smoke from, “We love you Americans.” “You being here makes me feel safer!”
The Jew nods. He is a little American. So, they can love him a little. I suppose in some round about logic if shit were about to hit the fan, if the invasion was immanent an American wouldn’t be out for lunch on the Corniche.
ADONAEV
What I do now is very important, but mostly only to me. No one is really watching me as closely as me. They’re all watching me order a so-called Seafood stew and a Coke that doesn’t even exist. Watching me ignore the manager and owner, no entitlements. No attachments. No OUTS, and also no INS. I have never been here before. But maybe I have. Retrace your steps. Don’t let her down again. Don’t let your Vice President Yaelle D’Arrigo down, or your little secretary Karessa Abe who you are claiming you love so much. Or at least using it as an acid test for your own alleged morality.
“They teach you in suicide intervention prevention training that offering an imbibing a glass of cold water is grounding; it’s a break in the tension.”
No one brings him any water. In the New York Grad cultural context that’s a sign you’re not welcome here. Not out of disrespect, but because it might influence his very next move. Might change the weather. No one moves any time faster than in pure Middle Eastern time; slower than slow as hell at all times like you live in a desert. Until something explodes? Or does graciousness take over?
The patron families don’t stare; they ignore him completely. But the Hamas men stare. How does he know they are Hamas men? The vibe is the vibe is the vibe. Hamas men have better suits than the men at the Hezbollah table. And why are these factions both at Monir’s? Because Israelis are about to invade Lebanon; it’s going to start World War Three. This will happen any minute, any hour now, or at least by the end of the week.
YELIZAVETA ALEKSANDROVNA KOTLYAROVA
(Inside his head)
“Show them you’re not afraid to live or to die for me!”
ADONAEV
What I do now is particularly important. They are all watching me order a Seafood stew and a Coke that doesn’t exist. They only have Pepsi in Lebanon. An American tourist, out of season. It is near wartime. Hamas means Resistance shortened to Zeal and Hezbollah means Party of God.
HAMAS MEN
“The Americans pay for the Zionist war so he should die, in my humble opinion,” says one.
“But maybe he could make a good hostage?” another one suggests.
“Most of the ones under Gaza are already dead!”
HEZBOLLAH MEN
“This is a funny scenario, almost a little obscene. We were here to talk to Hamas. What’s this Jew doing here, who does he work for. What interests are served by him being here. B for Bravery, but also a highly incorrect approach to doing any real negotiating.”
“They think they own the whole world,” one says.
“DO-YOU-WANT-ANOTHER-CIGARETTE-MR.-AMERICAN?” one asks him in loud English. And so, he takes one. Nods a thank you/Shokran, and he does a heart-tap-to-salute. The heart tap salute he learned from the Kurds, both hands to the heart, and a left-handed salute showing modesty, and gratitude together.
HAMAS MEN
“You used to be able to tell the weather by the running of the Jew, but it’s very sunny right now.”
“Like summer in December!”
“Lure him out to the back somehow?”
“Hit him in the head?”
HEZBOLLAH MEN
“This is not funny.”
“DO-YOU-WANT-ANOTHER-CIGARETTE-AMERICAN?” one asks him again in English. He takes another one. He then offers them his business card in gold and brown leaf. It says GCC which stands for ‘General Coordinating Committee’. Coordinating what, and for whom?
“Who trained this person?”
“No one trained him.”
“Why is he really here then? Why at this time?”
“To negotiate off channels?”
“No, he’s nobody. Nobody is protecting him he’s here wide out in the open.”
“Leave it all alone.”
The Jew of Beirut didn’t appear in blue purple smoke, poof! He did not have on such bad shoes, but they were bad for walking twenty kilometers on the Corniche from Christian Achrafieh out here. “Clarkes he prefers.” Chafing his heels. His suit is like a green PKK officer if they had officers, which they do not, just comrade friends. Just a hundred thousand friends in the hills with Kalashnikovs.
HEZBOLLAH MEN
“I think you should take leave Mr. American. No one stocks Coke-A-Cola here.”
TheHezbollah men nod, and the Jew gets up and leaves the place. Not having done more than smoke 3 cigarettes and washed his hands. No one in Hezbollah has any interest in a dead American right now. No one in Hezbollah has an interest in a dead American ever. The Jew leaves his card with the two tables of so-called terrorists. Maybe it’s all confabulation and he’s not leaving a card with anyone besides some middle-aged Lebanese tough guys in a famous seafood cafe that real terrorists wouldn’t be in anyways. Pure confabulation, real rooky moves.
YELIZAVETA
“This isn’t a movie. You’re gonna get your fucking Jew fingernails pulled out,” Yelizaveta tells him. Then, the Jew takes leave but turns hard right and keeps walking, down the Corniche southbound, walking and walking toward the Shi’a control zone.
Retrace your steps. Walk to the end of the Boardwalk where the Ferris wheels are. When you see them, it should start to look familiar. Like when we were at the AUB in the 70’s. You will find me in the Shatila Refugee camp. I will stop time for you.
***
So, he walks the Corniche until he comes to a place where it looks like the people are sealed inside. There he can see heavy duty checkpoints with armed guards and barbed wire and soviet looking block housing. But Yelizaveta or no Yelizaveta he can’t just blag his way inside and this was his first day back in Beirut. You can’t get into a Palestinian Refugee camp kind of state of mind on your very first day back in Beirut. It’s pushy, even for a Jew from New York. The Jew of Beirut is only pushy when it comes to life-or-death situations. And those are right around the corner to be sure.
***
Kaveh Ashuri is burly, Assyrian, Iranian, Persian, American. He goes into town before Yosef Bashir because he wants to see an old intractable flame. He wants to enjoy the city for a couple days before they get to work, even if he has to stop time. So, he stops time.
The sun dips below the horizon, painting the sky in hues of fiery orange and soft lilac, signaling the awakening of Beirut’s vibrant nightlife. In the heart of the city, where the ancient metropolis melded seamlessly with modernity, lay a labyrinth of narrow streets and bustling boulevards that came alive after dark. It was a city where time seemed to blur, and the past whispered through the cracks of its ancient walls, intertwining with the pulsating energy of the present.
Open mic night for stringed instruments.
Amidst the maze of alleys and cobblestone paths, nestled a quaint café, its walls adorned with eclectic graffiti and flickering lanterns casting a warm glow. The scent of freshly brewed coffee mingled with the sweet aroma of shisha smoke, creating an intoxicating ambiance that drew in locals and wanderers alike. At a corner table, bathed in the soft glow of candlelight, sat Anya Layla Noori, her dark curls cascading over her shoulders as she sipped on a cup of rich Arabic coffee. Her eyes, the color of warm honey, sparkled with a mixture of excitement and anticipation as she awaited her rendezvous with destiny. Across the room, amidst a lively group of patrons, stood Kaveh Ashuri, posing as a musician with fingers that danced effortlessly across the strings of his oud. His soulful melodies filled the air, weaving a tapestry of enchantment that transported the listeners to distant lands and forgotten dreams.
As the night wore on, Beirut revealed its true essence, a melting pot of cultures and traditions, where East met West and ancient metropolises embraced the modern world. Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians, and expatriates from every corner of the globe mingled effortlessly, their laughter and chatter blending into a symphony of harmony. Amid this vibrant tapestry, Layla’s eyes met Kaveh’s across the crowded room, and in that fleeting moment, time stood still. It was as if the universe conspired to bring them together, two souls destined to collide amidst the chaos of Beirut’s nocturnal embrace.
With a shy smile, Kaveh made his way towards Layla, his heart pounding with anticipation. In her presence, he felt a sense of belonging, as if he had finally found the missing piece of his soul amidst the cacophony of the city. Their conversation flows effortlessly, as they exchange stories of their lives, their dreams, and their deepest desires. In each other’s presence, they found solace and understanding, a connection that transcended language and culture.
As the night drew to a close, Kaveh took Layla’s hand in his own, his eyes searching hers for a flicker of doubt. But in the depths of her gaze, he found only certainty, a silent promise of a future yet to unfold. Together, they ventured out into the streets of Beirut, their footsteps echoing against the ancient walls as they embraced the magic of the night. In this city of contradictions and complexities, they found love, a beacon of light amidst the darkness, illuminating their path towards an uncertain yet exhilarating future.
Raqqa City, ISIS Controlled Territory, former Syria, 2016 ce
Thus recounts the highly devout and sometimes decapitation look away prone mujahadeen Abdullah Shamil Abu-Idris. One of the over 45,000 Sunni Muslim volunteers to arrive in support of the Islamic State.
ABU IDRIS
“There is a protracted siege now well underway of this Syrian Bunker Citadel, that historically changed hands many times; and it was clearly not going to end well. Not for the attackers, the defenders, or the 200,000 plus people trapped standing in between.”
Not every single so-called ‘Daesh’ is an intimately, innately miserable, and evil person. Some are also Turkish spies, the mentally ill, or rapists. Some are on drugs; some are sadists and people with identity crises. Some just wanted to fuck concubines. Or impose themselves upon others. For many of the ten million people who found themselves within the ISIS zone of control, an area around the size of Great Britain. It was the lesser of many evils. That is why in virtually every city that initially encountered ISIS with all but a few exceptions, there was no resistance at all.
The City of Raqqa at the height of the S.D.F. Offensive had around half a million people living in it and under it. Raqqah was re-developed by the Assad regime as one enormous bunker complex, a fallback base for the regime if Damascus fell. Which it nearly did. The capture of either Baghdad or Damascus, historic centers of Islam would have triggered in the global Muslim community a surge of foreign fighters. It would have subconsciously triggered a mighty influx of support.
“G-d is Great!”, but his actions are often in-understandable! Everywhere on earth the Ummah53 was trampled, suffering, crying out for the righteous to stand up to these Crusaders, these Shiite Apostates and their Zionist allies. That is what the Baghdadi Caliphate was set up to achieve. The defeat of the Kafirs and the glorious triumph of Sunni Islam. Real Islam, not the Islam of reformers, collaborationists, idolaters, and innovationists. Embracers of Shirk. The inevitable return of the Mahdi our redeemer. But, things have again completely fallen apart. We’re barely holding on now, surrounded by a united cohort of enemies.” As explained by the Jihadi Abdullah Abu-Idris a Syrian Arab from Medayiin captured and interrogated during the gruesome 9-month battle for Raqqah City.
“At the height of the Caliphate following the death of the Prophet Mohammed, Abu as Salem, in 200 years our Ummah stretched from Spain to Indonesia, from the Balkans down to Africa. The Caliphate of Baghdadi, well it was allegedly the size of Great Britain, had some 12 million subjects and stretched from just west of Baghdad to just east of Damascus. The largest city, currently completely under siege was Mosul and the administrative capital also completely now surrounded by Kurdish hordes is Ar Raqqah.”
There are barren beige rocky, earth dunes in every direction. Alongside the Euphrates River it is lush and periodically scenic, but less than three kilometers out; dust and despair. Ramadan has begun, but the infidels bombard us day and night. We are in full retreat on all sides.
It is so hot, but of course I remember to make my prayers and keep my faith, because I am a Muslim. I submit only to Allah, and I know the road I am on will lead me to paradise either in this world should we be victorious, or in the next should we fall as Martyrs.
There remains a deep vacuum in the depiction of the war to explain the motivation of the 40,000-50,000 estimated Muslim volunteers who crossed the world, infiltrated Iraq & Syria, to defend the radical Caliphate led by Baghdadi. Humanizing these people is essential to making any basic arguments that ISIS had real grievances and framed reality in a way that spoke and speaks to a whole generation of Muslims. However, as complex the span of motives might have been, but 2017 most of them were dead and the coalition had encircled both Mosul and Raqqa City their dual capitals. If a Mahdi was coming, he was extremely late in the game. As rapidly as “the Caliphate” had risen and marched in every direction, its forces were now obliterated. Of course, it was this hardcore of foreign fighters that held out the longest, with their families, with nowhere to run or hide.
My name is Abdullah Shamil Abu-Idris, or ‘Shamil Basayev’ as my name of the war. I’m named after a famous Chechen Mujahideen, freedom fighter killed in the liberation and resistance wars that happened in the Caucuses between 1994 and 2004. He was killed in an airstrike to his phone in 2006. I am Syrian, but to us Shamil is a real Muslim hero. He took on the Russians after all, the same barbarians we fight now on our southwestern front. Well anyway, the Russians eventually martyred Shamel. Allegedly also they killed 1 in 7 Chechens and raped 1 in 3 of all Chechen women. Which perhaps is why such a large contingent of foreign mujaheddin as Chechens.
Now, we fight the Russians and Hezbollah from the South and the Kurds from the North. In Mosul the Shiites surround us. The American airstrikes have completely tilted the battlefield against us.
There are not that many of us left. Perhaps 5,000 fighters, in the beginning it seemed we were sanctified and invisible, mujahedeen arriving from around the world. There is a distinctive dread of impending defeat. The Kafirs54have bombed all out cities and given weapons to the Kurds and Shi’ites who are our resolute enemies.
“I never got much enthusiasm from a public beheading.” I’m a good Muslim, so I never got down on the excesses happening under the mantle of the Caliphate. I came with my wife and two children from Chechnya. Clearly the Ummah is under attack in every corner of the globe and the Caliphate here was such an obvious form of resistance. The endless be-headings, gruesome public burnings and sex slaves were a little much for me. Over tea, some of us would go so far as to say it was the actual undoing of the entire Islamic State project this very well publicized brutality. Throwing homosexuals off the roof tops, well everyone had a chuckle about it, but really we should not have televised all that stuff.
Now, Mosul and Raqqa are completely besieged and we’re all going to fight to the death. Raqqah City was rather beautiful once. The Caliphate was nothing like all the slaughter and terrorism on the media, though we made that media, and we made that terrorism. What people will never understand, the Kafrs I mean, is that we all actually want a caliphate. We want women protected in the home. We want non-believers regulated paying the Demi tax55. We want alcohol and cigarettes banned. We want mandatory prayer five times a day. It’s Islamic to want these things. The Kurds are all secular communists, so we killed them. The Shi’a are treacherous hypocrites, so we killed them. The Yazidis are devil worshipers, so we massacred them in Sinjar and made their women sex slaves. I didn’t do any of that. I arrived in 2016. It was beginning to crumble apart, but I had faith in the Caliphate. Well of course I still do have faith that the will of Allah is highly complicated, and this grand set back is all part of a larger clash, a cosmic war. Of course, Islam will triumph in the end, because that is what the prophet declared. But, for now, things look bleak.
“I mean, how many generations of Muslims must fall to these crusaders before we restore the true religion of Islam? This is about resistance to the genocide of Muslims. Albeit strange that the leaders live in mansions and drive sports cars. Strange that none of the Imams are very learned. Strange that Turkish and Saudi money is all over the place in rumors, but all the ISIS leaders met in an American prison.”
Frankly, life here is not a lot better or a lot worse that in fascist Russia. I would say that for my family all things are comparable, or were until Raqqah was besieged. Now, I suppose we will all die here at the murderous hands of Kurdish communist armies.
I think it is good to die for Islam, but maybe for the sake of my family we will try and get through the lines and cross down the river to Al-Mayadeen. The last stand against the invading Kurdish army will be in the Deir-Ez-Zor Province, deep in the desert along the Euphrates River valley.
The Western Media dehumanizes Muslims and makes us look fanatical, but after our people are massacred in every single nation on earth and the West declares explicit war on our religion, what exactly is the moderate position? There isn’t one.
I was young when the towers came down, but it was appropriate. The C.I.A. and its Zionist allies have toppled the governments of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. They are remaking the Middle East for the good of Israel and oil corporations. The fact that their alliance against is one of Shiites and Kurds speaks to how they will stop at nothing, arm anyone to destroy Islamic law and governance. The great hypocrites are the Saudis for while they secretly send us money and clerics, they live off the glut of American petroleum trade.
This project, the Caliphate had contradictions of course. But it was popular to many and most under its rule. Sunnis welcomed a protecting force with so much instability in Syria and Iraq. Iraq has fallen to the Persian Kafirs who fight us with Iranian help in Mosul. We are better warriors than the Shi’a or Kurds, but we don’t have air power. This is why we are now losing the war town by town, street by street. I will likely not get out of Raqqah, but I will fight and die with the brothers for the Islamic State. I know that at least for me and my Muslim brothers, this is very historical and important. 40,000 of us came to support this, thus it is not the cult of Baghdadi or extremism. It is legitimate and essential to Sunni that this survives, whatever the odds.
I am of course willing to battle the Kafirs to protect true Islam! That is in the Qur’an. That is what Jihad is. War is terrible, the war in Syria is very awful. But we didn’t start the war. The war is a product of the big game between Russia and America. Everyone is clear on that. The Shiites side with Russia because of oil interests and politics. The Kurds side with America, because everyone hates their seditious plans.
Look, I am not so violent! I’m not so radical. I am against the sex slaves, the fast cars, and big houses of the leadership. I would like to sometimes have a drink or two, sometimes. I had bacon in Russia, it was very tasty. You will never understand why this was important to us, but it was very important to us. For my generation it was almost cataclysmic. As if the Prophet himself might show up any day now.
But in the end, he did not. And the coalition airstrikes took their bloody toll. Though I will meet a martyr’s death out here, I must say that the Caliphate and the rise of ISIS was enthralling to all the billion or more believers. Everywhere on earth Muslims are being massacred. Everywhere we are impoverished and abused. If like others I had sat this all out and watched, it on a TV screen I would not have lived up to my own beliefs about Allah and my faith and my religion.
Later, they beat me badly for many days. Then eventually I was executed in a ditch. I cannot really confirm or deny that there were any virgins where I went because I do not want to upset any of the tens of thousands of Islamic martyrs who resisted the Kurdish infidels, Shiite apostates, and Western Crusader forces. But when I died, I was just dead, with no bells, whistles, virgins, or rivers of milk, or of red wine. The only virgins were the Kurdish and Yazidi girls they all abused. And death came to most of us ether from the American planes above, or the pickup trucks of light infantry fighting under the banner of Abdullah Ocalan.
Jansher is a mustached bear of a man, clad in a forest green multicam uniform gesticulating all his lessons with his animated hands. He is the Georgian born Kadro entrusted with ideological training of incoming foreign fighters aiding the revolution in Rojava.
“A few hours ago, the Turkish State rocket bombed our training academy on the plateau of Mt. Qerechow.”
Eighteen Hevals perished then and there in the barrage, some of them newly arrived foreign volunteers. Five Peshmerga also died in the strikes. They were visiting us for tea. The training base has been moved down the ridge into the oil pumping facility. It is unclear what makes the new location any safer. A new batch of internationals has just arrived from Sulaymaniyah. The lessons and training must continue.
JANSHER
“People were being massacred and sold into sexual slavery. Gang rapes and decapitations were gleefully being live streamed. What exactly would you have done?” recounts Heval Jansher the intellectual Georgian Kadro responsible for the ideological and historical training of new Internationalist volunteers.
“We came down from the mountains in convoys of pickup trucks, semi-armored school buses and on foot. We moved in fearless columns, committing perhaps half of our remaining beleaguered armed forces. Tens of thousands of Yazidi men, women and children were huddling helplessly and exposed in the Shengal mountains. Without our intervention all their men would have been massacred and their women sold off in markets. In Kobane around this same time Daesh has surrounded our Syrian Kurdish brothers and sisters and were on the verge of wiping us off the ground in North Syria. At that time ISIS was 30 miles from Baghdad and 100 miles from Damascus. Everyday hundreds of foreign fanatics joined them. Entering easily with the help of the Turkish state.”
“We broke through the Turkish lines and along with American airstrikes saved Kobane from destruction. We literally saved the lives of over 50,000 Yazidis trapped in the Sinjar facing Daesh genocide. We took up positions in Kirkuk awaiting an inevitable Daesh or Iraqi Army attack.”
Sometimes we changed out of our baggy green guerrilla uniforms into those of local forces or simply took the uniform off. Without the Party, without the People’s Defense Forces which bolstered every Y.P.G./Y.P.J. position there would have been no one for the Americans to arm as it would have all been Islamic State territory.
It is possible that the P.K.K., the Kurdistan Workers Party did some very nasty things internally and externally during its forty-year war with the Turkish State. Certainly, there were both internal purges of real and imagined counter revolutionaries as well as deliberate attacks on civilians, but war is war, and war is very brutal on absolutely everyone.
The P.K.K. was trained in war by the Palestinians in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon in the 1970’s. There is a historic sympathy that the Party has to the cause of Palestine as a thankful result of this early collaboration. It is completely unacknowledged, and unsubstantiated that the Russians also trained the P.K.K. But that’s who was hanging out in the Bekaa Valley in the 1980’s. Palestinian guerrillas. Iranian special forces. Lebanese Shiite partisans. Russian spies.
The P.K.K. got openly involved in the fight against ISIS first in Kobane and then in Sinjar. It can be said in unambiguous terms that without the leadership of the Party, assisted by coalition air power the revolution in Rojava would not have survived the Islamic State onslaught. Abdullah Ocalan has been in prison since 1999.
A variety of tactical and ideological innovations have had to be made for us to survive. However, the adaptation of Democratic Confederalism is not a publicity stunt or mere revisionism. The Party has had to adapt, Ocalan has helped us find the context to adapt. Without his leadership the P.K.K. would not have withstood the tumultuous collapse of global state socialism in the 1990s.
The Revolution in Rojava is of course a product of Party discipline and functionally speaking there is extraordinarily little difference between the Y.P.G./Y.P.J. and the People’s Defense Forces49 of the P.K.K., most of the Y.P.G./Y.P.J. commanders are P.K.K. cadres.
In the insurrection against the Turkish State which began in this phase in 1984, over 50,000 people died and most of them were Kurds. If nasty, brutal violent things such as burying people alive, executing busloads of Turkish civil servants, carrying out suicide bombings, periodically purging the ranks of real or accused counter revolutionaries.
But even though we are declared a terrorist organization because Turkey is so important to N.A.T.O. and the Kurdish issue is so intractable, the U.S. led coalition of course used the Y.P.G./Y.P.J. dressed up as the Syrian Democratic Forces to annihilate ISIS. The Turkish state had a daily telephone riot with their American counterparts. No one was stupid. Everyone knew every dollar, every rifle and every bit of training given to the Syrian Democratic Forces which was over 60% Kurdish Y.P.G./Y.P.J. anyway would be routed to the P.K.K. when the war with ISIS was over and the fighting resumed in earnest between the Kurdish allies and Turkish Army. But, in 2015 after Kobane there was no other reliable ally on the ground and the Turks had to wait for the dust to settle. In Kobane the tide was turned for ISIS and the S.D.F. became the default U.S. Coalition proxy in Syria. Between 2015 and 2018 the S.D.F. smashed ISIS towns and cities from the North and the Assad Regime aided by the Russians hit them from the West. With no friends, under attack in every direction the once seemingly invincible Jihadists of Daesh were defeated, falling back to Ar-Raqqah and holes in the desert to hide. The Regime forces, Hezbollah, the S.D.F., the P.K.K. the Coalition, the Iraqi Army, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the al-Hashid ash-Sha’bi Popular Mobilization Forces50 we all ground them under our boot heels on all sides. Now only Deir Ez-Zor is left to liberate. But once these Cheta Daesh are temporarily defeated, isolated, trampled on and crushed in some shitty desert town that will change nothing. The Saudi funded and Pakistani spread Wahabbi-Salfist51 virus. By no means will this war be over any time soon.
By 2014 around the time that the Y.P.G./ Y.P.J. militia, assisted heavily by the P.K.K.’s People’s Defense Forces, the K.D.P. Peshmerga and the Coalition airstrikes were battling their way out of the ISIS siege in Kobane, effectively cementing for five years an American led Coalition- leftist Kurdish alliance and changing the dynamics of the Civil War in the North of Syria completely. But no one was stupid, not Turkey, not Daesh not the American Special Forces sent to arm and coordinate airstrikes with us. There were acrimony upon acronyms, there were shells of meaningless letters to make the American Congress feel better about releasing military aid. No one Heval was completely stupid. We all knew that the very minute Daesh was defeated we’d be alone and that all these enemies and friends knew the truth. That nothing happening politically or militarily in North Syria would be decided except by the Party.
The P.K.K. Our Party, the Kurdistan Workers Party! To the Turks we are nefarious terrorists. They want to hunt us down and kill us all. For we are an existential threat to the Turkish State. All states, really Hevals. They convinced America and Europe to adopt that line. To the Kurdish people the premier Party of Resistance to oppression and total annihilation as a coherent people. The very last defense against seemingly triumphant Capitalist Modernity. The only military force capable of defeating I.S.I.S. on the ground. An entity that is outside the immediate theatre of war, except for Russia and China, still very much considered a terror group by the West and N.A.T.O. forces of which the Turkish State contributes the second largest military force. Over 250,000 combatants.
No one in their wildest dreams can imagine that when the smoke clears and ash settle that the first Democratic Confederalist polity, safeguarding some 4-5 million people will be allowed to survive. But for now, the total rubble of what was left from the siege of Kobane has in defiance been rebuilt in the sprawl of white brutalist two to six story dwellings buttressing in defiance the long white wall and treacherous minefield the Turks built across the entire northern border.
Says Heval Commander Cancer, pronounced ‘Jansher’ the Guerrilla from his notes:
JANSHER
“Actually, I tried to prepare them for a lifestyle of revolutionary militancy. Kill the enemy. Kill the enemy before the enemy can airstrike, execute, torture or disappear you and your friends. I don’t think they all got it. The training was just too short. They retained much of their Western bourgeoisie privileges. They thought it would maybe be like a movie. It’s a shame the British woman died, she was the one with possibly the very most revolutionary potential, for a foreigner excluding the Germans. That’s all I can say about that, Heval.” Heval is the Kurdish Kurmanji word for friend, or comrade. In case you had forgotten that. Sometimes I find it best to repeat myself repeatedly to make sure you’re paying attention. I was born in Georgia. I’m not even ethnically Kurdish, actually.
Within the Kurdish movement there is a tendency to imbibe a rather endless amount of black tea. A tendency to have poor sleeping habits. A tendency to chain smoke. But they also light their own cigarettes. To let another light your cigarette is ideologically suspect.
Sometimes, the Party has debated on banning cigarette smoking, like it has alcohol, drugs, sex, romance, having kids, having a family, contacting your immediate family and acquiring any material things beyond what fits in a ruck sack, in service of the war effort. However, being a revolutionary militant is quite stressful actually. And there sure are a lot of things that can kill you faster than a cigarette. A whole lot of things, actually.
“The legend goes that in a meeting in a tea house in the village of Lice near Diyarbakir City, on November 25th of 1978 a group of young students lead by Abdullah Ocalan founded the Kurdistan Workers Party and launched a revolution unlike anything the world had ever seen before it,” explains Heval Jansher. A guerrilla in good standing with the Party. Good standing means trust. Good standing means not being a Pizkarek; a problem. They need to be platformed, as we say. Bad standing means re-education, prolonged isolation, or indefinite detention. Eventually, if nothing else seems to work, it means a bullet and an unmarked grave. We are not fucking around. There is a revolution to defend. When this is over, everything sacrifice, every shahid will have allowed the birth of a new world from the ashes of the old. But if we fail, there is more at stake than the deliverance of a Kurdish national autonomy. There is more at stake than redemption of a flailing old idea about liberty, equality, democracy. If we survive the coming years. If we secure the Rojava Revolution. These ideas will spread like wildfire. If we are vanquished, human rights will be buried with us.
“Genocide on the Holy Mountain. The men are executed. The women and children enslaved.”
On August 3, 2014, ISIS attacked Sinjar. Yazidis were hunted like animals. Men were lined up and shot. Women and girls, some as young as nine, were sold as slaves. Boys were stolen, forced to fight, or die. Thousands fled to Mount Sinjar, trapped under the sun without food or water. Many perished before help came. Mass graves fill the region. Survivors live in ruins or camps, haunted by the names of the missing.
“We woke up with dreams of life. By nightfall, everything was ash.”
Bahaa Ilyas and Roza Saeed Al-Qaidi are Yazidi activists.These are their words. Taken from reports made right after the genocide:
“The sun greeted me as I woke on the morning of 3 August 2014. I was a researcher at the University of Duhok, 200 miles from Sinjar. It was to be a joyful day as I was waiting – first for my salary, and then for Roza, my then-fiancée. Roza and I had plans to go shopping for our engagement party, which was to take place a few days later. We were excited, our future now starting to unfurl before us. We have not felt that way again since.”
“As Roza and I waited at the bank, uneasy murmurs started around us, and phones began to ring. My phone vibrated; a friend was calling. ISIS has attacked Sinjar, he said frantically. Time stopped as the news took hold of us. Roza phoned her sister who was at her home on the outskirts of Duhok. Her sister told her that videos were being published online of ISIS fighters in Sinjar, and that there was news of killings of Yazidis in the streets. I called another friend, a Yazidi man in a village in Sinjar, who described ISIS vehicles with banners and heavy artillery driving past his home. My mother who was in my family’s town of Bashiqa, also called to say she had heard that ISIS was slaughtering Yazidi men and taking away women. Yazidis are fleeing,” she said, urgently.
“I withdrew as much cash as I could and ran outside to flag down a car to take me to my mother in Bashiqa. Roza waited for a bus to take her to her family’s village outside of Duhok. We said goodbye tearfully, but quickly. We were not sure when we would see each other again. I made my way to my town, into which ISIS had not yet advanced. My entire family was put into the cars and drove to Lalesh, the Yazidi holy site near Duhok. Concerned that ISIS would advance to Lalesh, women and children were then driven by car to Duhok. Some of my uncles and myself followed on foot. Two days later, ISIS occupied Bashiqa. My family survived, but thousands of Yazidis in Sinjar did not.”
“The Yazidis are a religious minority that has existed for millennia. With less than a million individuals, most of us live in the Kurdish Region of Iraq. Other Yazidi communities live in Syria, Turkey, Russia, Armenia, and Georgia, as well as farther afield, in Germany, the US and elsewhere. The Yazidi faith descends from the ancient religions of Mesopotamia, and today we believe in the one God. That the Yazidis are a pre-Judaic religion and so are not ‘People of the Book’, has long motivated the political, economic and social marginalization of our community.”
“At various points throughout our history, attempts have been made to wipe us out– we regularly refer to the ‘73 genocides’ that we have suffered. Prior to the ISIS attack, it was the Ottoman Turks who had made the most successful attempt. Misunderstandings of our faith are deeply rooted, and it is not uncommon for people to casually – and wrongly – refer to us as ‘devil worshippers’ or ‘those who worship stones’. ISIS founded its genocidal attack on these old prejudices.”
“In the early hours of the morning of 3 August 2014, while I was still asleep in Duhok, ISIS fighters left their bases in Iraq and Syria and moved towards the Sinjar region in northwest Iraq, close to the Iraqi Syrian border. Hundreds of villages are spread out around the base of Mount Sinjar, with one main town, Sinjar town, huddled at the base of the southeastern side of the mountain. Mount Sinjar, an arid 100-kilometre-long mountain range, forms the region’s heart. Before the ISIS attacks, the majority of the region’s inhabitants were Yazidis, with a smaller number of Sunni Arabs. The relationship between the Yazidi and Arab communities, who lived together in Sinjar town and in some of the other villages, was built on friendship and neighborly relations that extended across generations.”
“ISIS attack on Sinjar came two months after they occupied Mosul in June 2014. It was quickly apparent that the Yazidis were their target, our existence perceived to be a stain on their so-called caliphate. Some families fled into the Kurdish Region of Iraq. Others escaped to the upper slopes of Mount Sinjar, where they were besieged by ISIS. Thousands were trapped under Iraq’s August sun, with no shade, water, food or medical care. Hundreds died on the mountain before the Syrian Kurdish forces, operating under the cover of Iraqi and American airstrikes, rescued the survivors.”
“ISIS captured thousands of Yazidis in their villages or on the roads during their attempt to flee. Within 72 hours, most of the villages had been emptied, with the exception of Kocho, which ISIS did not vacate its residents until 15 August 2014. Upon capture, ISIS fighters separated Yazidi men and adolescent boys from their families. All the men and boys were executed, often by a shot to the back of the head. Their families were sometimes made to watch. ISIS fighters then moved the Yazidi women and children deeper into ISIS-controlled territory where they were registered. ISIS took note of the ages of the women and girls over the age of 9: whether they were married or not; whether they had children and, if so, how many. In short, they were pricing them.”
“Yazidi women and girls have been sold and resold into sexual slavery, beaten, starved and forced into labor in the homes of ISIS fighters. ISIS does not permit the sale of Yazidis to non-ISIS members, but the money to be made is enough for fighters to risk their own lives breaching this rule. Fighters sell women and children back to their families for tens of thousands of US dollars.Yazidi families are selling all they have, and borrowing more, to buy back their women and children from the men who raped and tortured them. There has been tremendous media attention on Yazidi women and girls who have been enslaved – but there has been little attempt to understand how the crimes ISIS commits against our women and girls fit into the group’s attempts to destroy our community. The Yazidi women and girls held by ISIS are not ‘sex slaves.’ They are genocide survivors, and for those who did not survive, they are victims.”
“Boys over the age of 7 are taken from their mothers and forced into ISIS training camps, where they are indoctrinated and taught to fight. Some have died fighting on ISIS’s frontlines. It has been difficult to locate the boys and rescue them.”
“As ISIS-controlled territory in Iraq and Syria came under aerial attack by the US-led coalition, Yazidi captives, trapped in fighters’ houses and on ISIS military bases, were reportedly among the casualties. As the ‘caliphate’ crumbled, ISIS fighters fled, taking the captured Yazidi women and children with them. Their fate and whereabouts remain unknown.”
“Today, I am back living in Duhok and working as a research assistant on the LSE Middle East Centre’s project ‘Documenting Yazidi Victims of ISIS’. The project aims to build a consolidated database of Yazidi victims by age, gender, location and crime(s) suffered, using rigorous demographic techniques modelled on the methodology accepted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Our team will – with the consent of the survivors and their communities – create and organize data collected for use in accountability proceedings, identification of remains in mass graves, humanitarian interventions, community-building, and broader advocacy. It is specifically envisaged, and is an integral aspect of the methodological planning, that the documentation project will play a significant role in achieving justice for Yazidis against the crimes committed against them by ISIS. The data will ground existing advocacy for accountability processes in national, regional and international courts and tribunals. Once courts or tribunals seize the cases, the documentation project’s data will provide reliable information of high probative value for use before various existing and future accountability processes. I am proud to be part of this effort.”
“For the Yazidis who have survived, most of us now live in displaced people’s camps, unfinished buildings and in rented accommodation in the Kurdish Region of Iraq. A small number have received asylum in Germany, Sweden, Canada and elsewhere. Others, in their desperation to find safety, have fled on dinghies to Greece. Some, including people I know, have drowned in the Mediterranean. A few have taken the risk and returned to Sinjar, which – though destroyed – is now under the control of the Iraqi central government. The region, littered with IEDs, is not yet safe. Mass graves holding the remains of Yazidis are regularly uncovered. There is a need for forensic preservation and analysis and more generally for reconstruction. Living with dignity in Sinjar remains a challenge.”
“The Yazidis continue to hope for the rescue and return of the women and children still held by ISIS. We hold out hope that some of the Yazidi men captured have survived and might also be reunited with their families. We have survived, for now, ISIS’s attempt to destroy us, but we remain a deeply traumatized community in need of support: psycho-social support, educational and livelihood initiatives, including those specifically aimed at increasing female social and economic independence, forensic documentation of mass graves, reconstruction, including infrastructure for potable water, healthcare and education – our list is long.But if I were to summarize, I would say the Yazidi community, displaced from Sinjar and desirous to return, needs three things: assured security, justice for the crimes committed against us and recognition of the genocide. The prejudices against our community must be uprooted and made to wither in the light. This requires the calling of the crime committed against us by its true name.”
“The morning, I awoke thinking about my engagement belonging to a more innocent time, one to which Roza and I cannot return. This morning, I sat in front of my computer. On its screen are the names of thousands and thousands of Yazidis.”
“They are categorized: killed, kidnapped, missing. I know they, like me, they once woke up looking forward to the day ahead of them.”
Report by:
Bahaa Ilyas is a Yazidi activist who has been in close contact with internally displaced people through different agencies and organizations since 2014. Currently, he is a researcher on the LSE Middle East Centre’s ‘Documenting Yazidi Victims of ISIS’ project.
Roza Saeed Al-Qaidi is a Yazidi activist. Since ISIS’ attacks on the Yazidis in August 2014, she has been involved in humanitarian aid and has interviewed Yazidi survivors, particularly women and girls who had been sexually enslaved by ISIS fighters, on behalf of several different organizations.
***
As Further explains the fixer “Abu Hamza”, the assumed Kunya47 of a Kurdish businessman named Alacan Al-Biban of Kirkuk City, fixer, artist, gentleman, man about town in Erbil.
ABU HAMZA
“The Yazidis live in and around a holy mountain called Jabal Sinjar. It lies along the Syrian Iraqi border 80 kilometers West from Mosul in the Nineveh Governorate. Their holiest site called Lalish, the tomb of their avatar for the Peacock Angel48 “Tawuse Melek”, Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir is found between three mountains. The Arafat, the Misat and the Hizrat.”
On the highest peak of Jabal Sinjar is the Chel Mera Temple. “The Temple of Forty Men”. The temple is so ancient no one remembers how it got that name, but it is believed forty men were buried there.
The Yazidis have three hereditary castes; the Murids, the Sheikhs and the Pirs. In some ways their beliefs are linked to Sufism and Zoroastrianism. They believe in reincarnation and forbid intermarriage with other groups. Although some claim they have holy books called the Kiteba Cilwe (Book of Revelation) and Mishefa Res (Black Book), there is great reason to believe these are forgeries created in 1911-1913 and virtually all Yazidi religious theology is a chain or oral transmission called Qawls; hymns with cryptic allusions and supporting stories.
The Yazidis are ethnically and linguistically Kurdish. They speak Kurmanji, like the Kurds of Syria and Turkey. They are concentrated in Northwestern Iraq in a highly mountainous area called Sinjar by the Arabs or Shengal, by the Kurds. They are monotheistic, Gnostic religion. Over the years Sunni Muslim Arabs have typically accused them of devil worship, because of their belief in a pea cock fire angel. In 1414 their sacred Lalish was razed. In 1640, Ottoman Turks carried out a pogrom killing around 5,000 of them. In 1892 Turkish Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II mass conscripted the men to eradicate their faith. In 1974-1975 Saddam Hussein deported Yazidis and re-settled Arabs in Sinjar. Around 137 Yazidi villages were destroyed. In 2007 there was a Jihadi campaign of bus bombings, kidnappings and terrorism that left as many as 300 Yazidis death and over 1,500 injured. In 2009 Al-Qaeda used a series of truck bombs in Sinjar to kill upwards of 500 Yazidis in Qahtaniya and al-Jazira. So, Turks and Arabs killing Yazidi is as Sunni Islamic as tea and shawarma.
The story of the woman being fed, oh yes, fed, her one-year-old son. A later story.
In August of 2014 “Those who run from death”, the KDP Peshmerga, abandoned their positions and allowed almost all of Shengal to fall to ISIS without firing a shot. ISIS then began a rapid campaign of summary execution, forced conversions, sex slaving and out right genocide. On August 3rd, 2014, ISIS captured the holy city of Sinjar. A massacre began. Over 200,000 Yazidis fled into the surrounding mountainside. 50,000 of them were trapped on Mt. Sinjar, exposed to the elements with ISIS bandits raping and murdering their family and friends. ISIS Cheta shot 70 to 90 men in Quiniyah Village, 360 in Harden village. 200 Yazidis were lined up and shot in Sinjar city. 60 to 70 killed in Ramadi Jabal. 50 in Dhola village, 100 in Khana Sor and 200 more on the road between Adaniaya and Jazeera. Dozens in al-Shimal village and more on the road from Matu to Jabal Sinjar. Women were gang raped. Children were buried alive. In most cases the Yazidi girls and women were separated for rape and sex traffic to various ISIS held cities. Old women were shot.
Using rape as a weapon of war Daesh bandits had gynecologists examine their captives to set slave prices based on virginity. They were treated like cattle. There were online price indexes. Sales on Telegram, Facebook and WhatsApp. Prices varied. Between $2,000.00 and $10,000.00. Less than 5 women escaped. Many died in captivity or allied bombardment.
The Sinjar Mountains are over 100 km long-range running east to west. The lower western segment in Syria and eastern higher segment in Iraq. The range is viewed as sacred by the Yazidis who consider them the place where Noah’s ark came to rest.
On August 8th the United States President Barack Obama ordered airstrikes against ISIS in the area of Sinjar. Air strikes and supply drops for the Yazidis hiding there.
ABU HAMZA
The 50,000 Yazidi besieged on top of Mount Sinjar began to die from hunger and thirst and exposure to the elements. On August 10th P.K.K. and Y.P.G. guerrillas, with truck mounted heavy machine guns supported by mobile light infantry charges, broke the ISIS siege and began guiding Yazidis to refugee camps and shelter. Some were evacuated by the Peshmerga via Cezanne and Telkocher roads to Dohuk, Iraq-K.R.G. Though the majority broke out with the P.K.K.-Y.P.G. safe corridor to Rojava.
They fought most of the rescue operation from pick-up trucks or on foot. With small backpacks which mostly had been loaded with extra magazines and hand-grenades, canteens of water and sometimes a few cans of Mortadella. Or canned olives or whatever there was left before they shipped out. Clad in green baggy fatigues the PKK made a rapid incursion through ISIS held territory to launch the largest humanitarian evacuation of the war, saving the lives of tens of thousands of civilians hiding on the mountain. By August 8th most of the remaining Yazidis had been evacuated by the P.K.K. to the K.R.G. areas and Rojava. On August 10th airstrikes opened a passage for another P.K.K. evacuation into Syria of some additional 20,000 to 30,000 Yazidis. But there were still around 10,000 trapped on the mountain by 13th August receiving airdrops of food and water from the coalition forces. Eventually, the guerrillas got almost everybody still alive out alive.
On August 15th there was a large massacre in Kojo. Over 80 men were killed outright. The entire male population of Khocho, around 400 men were butchered. Around 1,000 women and children were abducted for sex slavery. In Tal Afar 200 Yazidi were shot at the prison. A report in late September concluded over 5,000 Yazidis had been exterminated. Several thousand, perhaps as many as 7,000-10,800 women and girls were carried off to Mosul, Raqqa and other ISIS strongholds. The confirmation of the missing versus the dead has not been cleared up yet and will not be for many years later.
Repeated raids by P.K.K. commandos rescued 51 Yazidis in March and 53 in April. Most of the abducted women and girls are still missing, having been living in brutal, in-human slavery for over four years. Most have been presumed dead. Mass graves keep getting found all over the liberated areas.
“From time to time a young woman, an escapee, jumps off Mt. Sinjar. That will probably go on for many years to come, a dark disturbed pattern in a community wholly unaccustomed to this level of barbarism” explains Alacan, known mostly to outsiders and journalists as “Abu Hamza”. “They were all mentally and physically abused by the vile bearded Chetta in ways we cannot ever possibly comprehend. That few can even bear to hear. Fewer still wish to talk about.”
At the Green Village Outpost contact line our tabor is told to dig in. So, for a few days we helped sandbag and fortify what appears like the accommodations of long fled oil workers. Something green and modern looking in the bleak oil lands of Der Ez Zor province. Oasis in the Wastelands north of the Euphrates. The Turkish Army is coming.
SEBASTIAN ADONAEV
“Sometimes I close my eyes and remember your lips.” Late into the long trips home. I have no home; it was your home only. Only my ugly little flats around the Brooklyn Soviet. Rented in desperation, vulnerability, an admission of poverty. And I will never go back to that humiliating life. I will never see you again, or see Russia, or Cuba, or Mehanata or any other type of slavery life. Your lips and whispers are still lingering Goldy. It forever remains.
Now deployed about ten days ago to the Southern front near Omar Fields. Daesh is nearly finished they say. Assigned first to Tabor Shihad Lawrence, five quickly died by snipers and mines in the first night of the operation.
The twenty international volunteers are all drifting in different directions. They prefer we not all die at the same time. There are supposedly around 500 international fighters in Rojava, mostly from the U.S. and Europe, also Türkiye. But numbers and time to the Kurds mean absolutely nothing. So maybe there are 500, or maybe just 50. Who knows Heval, who knows!
“Daesh is nearly defeated.” The Islamic State once size of Great Britain at its maximal, poised to take Baghdad and Damascus is reduced to the wastelands of the deep desert and a strong of indefensible towns along the Euphrates River southeast. From the North the Syrian Democratic Forces supported by the Western Coalition advance. We are part of that force. On the other side of the Euphrates the Russian Army, Lebanese Hezbollah, and the Syrian Army advance. We all try and not shoot at each other, at least until ISIS is finished. Over the border in Iraq ISIS has been largely crushed; the Shi’a Popular Mobilization Forces, the Iraqi Army, the Iranian Pasdaran, and Western advisors and Special forces have all but driven ISIS from Iraq to the Syrian border.
The name I have been given is Heval Kawa Zivistan which means “Comrade Black Smith Winter.” I am a Paramedic in civilian life and therefore one of the highest medically trained foreigners in the brigade. Heval Shoresh from Brooklyn, I have known him since childhood. He has a child back in America. And I judge him for being here were it my right to judge. But this palace and this revolution is irresistible to us both. He is a gardener back home. Here he carries a heavy-duty long-range, high-power rifle called a Dastun which is about twice his size. Hard to aim.
There is Heval Sasson from Austria. He was an EMT who once travelled with his girlfriend all over Africa on a motorcycle. He is quiet, ideological, principled and socialist in disposition. With also is Scottish Heval Ciya a former British solider. Also, the mad man possible career criminal kicked out of the French foreign Legion called Heval Sivan, who although he claims he was also a British solider can’t hit a target with an AK to save his reputation. He hasn’t let up for many days talking about the Order of the Knights Templar, talking about the Knights of Malta; actually, engaged in an unending pressure of speech manic diatribe about the new crusades, that we are allegedly in. There’s also Heval Azad from Albania, something of a gypsy, a bespeckeld intellectual; an anarchist of course.
There is also a French Legionnaire of enormous size, almost a giant. He is called Heval Gabar and speaks only of the Legion, reveals nothing of his life. He isn’t very well liked by the other internationals. There is also a young kid who looks not more than 16 but is allegedly 18 his name is Max. One of the few held back in the Academy because of minor injury. He is dubbed “Heval Maslum”, but everyone just calls him Max. And that is how he introduces himself. He’s allegedly from Salem, Oregon. No matter what sems to happen he just repeats, “I don’t care.”
After the 5 Arab conscripts were blown apart the first night, they broke the internationals nto smaller groupings. Ciya and Sivan were sent to a YPG Cadro Tabor based on being British military they were sent to the front. Soresh, Maslum, Gabar were merged into an Arab unit and sent to the front. Sasson and I were attached to Kurdish Red Crescent outpost in the Naqta in Omar Fields. Gabar and Maslum dubbed “pizkereks” or problem makers were sent to guard a fox hole on the edge of some useless “liberated village”. No one knew where Heval Azad was sent, but Albanians are very tough crafty bunker people.
“He will turn up and be just fine!” Heval Sasson says, ever an Austrian optimist. “But he just as easily could have stepped on a mine and blown off a leg or been hit by sniper bullet.
***
Then night came and Sasson and I were quartered in a farmhouse. The commander invited us over to the field command for tea. The mood was the war with Daesh was almost over and very soon we would all be fighting Turkey in the north and or Assads forces right over the river.
The Commander is named Heval Azadi. They basically cycle out the same 50 Kurdish code names for everyone seems like. The commander in very broken English invites us for black Tea in one of the many pillow rooms they like to build.
“Trump say, no more guns for YPG,” he tells us the SDF is the brand the YPG uses to appear more inclusive, a little less Apoist, a little more not the PKK, but the commanders almost always say YPG or PKK, there’s a lot of little acronyms for small armies out here. The YPG, or the People’s Defense Forces make up 80% of the SDF; the Syrian Democratic Forces. All the best commanders are Turkish Kurd PKK trained.
“Daesh done in Iraq. Two towns left,” Azadi tells us.
“24 little Gundes to take along the river,” he says. A Gunde is a village.
“In Moscow, the PKK make a deal with regime,” he says, regime meaning Assad and Syrian Army, “Iran, regime, Russian make deal on autonomy and oil rights.”
We are engaged in an operation to seize Syria’s oil fields, Sasson had explained. There were not many ISIS fighters left after Mosul and Raqqah fell. This is all now about who can take as many oil fields as possible to negotiate the final settlements. This seems to discourage Heval Sasson.
“Really all that is left now, “says Commander, “NUSRA Front and HDS in Idlib.”
“Al Qaeda’s Syrian brand,” Sasson tells me.
“The PKK make a deal in Moscow; we will end making terms with Assad. The HDS, the Nusra, the Deash all the Islamist proxies in Idlib, Bab and Jarabulus City they must be eliminated to close the gap.”
“Closing-the-Gap” we learned in the Academy was about pushing through the Islamists into Turkish Hatay Province to gain sea access for Rojava. The Gap also being closing the lines between Afrin and Kobane. Afrin Canton is hard to resupply and will be the first thing the Turks attack.
“As soon as Deash war is over Turkey will attack, you will fight with Turkey?” They all wanted to know that. Would we all stay and fight the second biggest army in Nato.
“Of course we will,” Kawa claims, but Sasson knows suicide is also problematic when they return to their homelands. In fact, it is well known that many of the prior volunteers, of which there were only maybe two thousand over the past ten years; they didn’t adjust well here or there. But this was an antidote. Some did multiple tours, others died in other foreign lands for lesser causes.
“When Daesh is done there will be no ceasefire. Turkey will attack immediately. 45% of call Syria now in Rojava. In SDF hands. Turkey will waste no time,” says Heval Baran from Germany. Baran had set out to join the PKK, but after 6 months on the mountain they sent him to the YPG. The Germans apparently are the best suited of the internationals to adjust to Kadro life, but Baran said simply; “I don;t really want to give up women.” The life of a Kadro is one without any material things, no attachments, not sex no marriage. Life of total dedication to the struggle.
We all speculated about “Fighting the Turks near Afrin” while in the Academy. It will be slaughtered. A cadro boasts that “We have peace deals with USA and with Russia maybe also China!” But the dependency on the U.S. airpower is real.
“The Regime will not ever accept Rojava in any form, it is just too weak to defeat it right now.”
“Russia will never abandon the regime,” someone says in Kurdish.
“It is like America and Israel; you have Syria and Russia. The Regime gives Russian Mediterranean Seaport access, the Regime is only alive because of Russia and Iran.”
“There are many factors. Russian is loyal, America is not. When Daesh is over there will be no more guns, no more air support.”
“How many Western volunteers do you think are still in Rojava,” Sasson asks the commander.
“40, maybe even much less,” the Commander says. “50,000 came to fight for Daesh, maybe over time 2,000 came to help the SDF. 1,500 leftists from Turkey and 500 from the West. Now, in country still, 50 maybe.” “The airports in Erbil and Slemani are still shut down because of the independence referendum. For now, you are here to stay. Who knows what will happen. PJAK is now fighting in Iran again. Maybe soon more fighting between Iraqi Army and Pesh Merga. And Turkey! They are coming trust me heval.”
Goldy wrote that she might have to marry her rich ugly patron. Polina wrote she is leaving me since I am “on the other side of the planet now” Chanie is “back with Charlie”, so probably I will never hear from her again. Anya Noori, my attaché, sent me some news from Baghdad. “They are arresting Western volunteers without good paperwork coming back from Rojava. Slemani and Erbil airports are down everyone must go out from Baghdad.” But I have good paperwork. I called my parents the other day. An Arab had sold me a Syrian SIM card. They seem proud that I am there. I hope I can hold it together and reach ‘the mountaintop.’ There, if I am open-minded, I will finally understand the truth; into its innermost parts.
Like in my dreams, the EMT Program of Kurdistan is just a means to an end. And after thought, the G.C.C. is barely useful or functional any more out here. My so-called partners Andrew, Forti, Jessica, Matthew Smith, Ovid all have defected and left me out here with no help. Can I count on David Smith, Kaveh, Jonah, or Dr. Wagner, probably not or only for a little.
Everything here is an assault on my senses! Daily, I must learn ideology, discipline, war, Arabic, Kurmanji, keep Sasson and I from stepping on mines, dying in airstrikes, getting enough water. Sasson has said he is willing to help me run the EMT program if only we can get authorization to do so. The Kurds do not believe in time, they do not believe in space, and they do not believe in relying on foreigners. They do seem to believe concurrently in American led coalition airpower.
The others we trained with, the twenty, are all dispersed to different positions. Ten to Afrin and ten to Der Ez Zore. They must choose their own adventures in Rojava. I do hope that Soresh stays alive for the sake of his 6-year-old child and young wife. Ciya and Sasson signed the G.C.C. paperwork, the cover contracts that they will claim later to the government of Austria and Scottland that when they did out here was purely medical. But it’s not so much will they stay 6 months to train in an EMT program it’s more will the war ever actually end to allow the time and space to justify one.
It’s impossible to know how far up the mountain any of us will really ever go. Heval Barron was there almost a year. The German heval said little good or bad about it, he barely said much.
So many ways to die out here. We or most of the 2,000, or 500, or 50 shared a noble goal. Defeat Daesh, defend the Revolution in Rojava. In the meantime, Sasson and I have been training Arab fighters in life saving skills. We try and stay sane. I am sure I will have to use this AK-47 before this is all over. The thought does not bother me, but I do not delight in the thought of any killing.
Today, a villager “gundi” handed me their sick infant and I listened to its lungs and heart, and helped prepare some Pedialyte mix. The child was sick but dehydrated and stable, the Arab comrades keep telling people an American doctor is in the camp. But even in Syria I am still just a a paramedic not a doctor at all.
So much responsibility is on my shoulders. They all have varying medical issues. Infected toes, rotting death, abdominal pains. I do what I can. The Party purchased me a huge rolling duffle bag of medications and medical supplies. So, we stay as busy as we can.
I daydream, and hope Goldy thinks about me more than sometimes, but probably only Chanie does when she is allowed to. Goldy sometimes WhatsApp’s me cute photos and sometimes Anya, the attaché flirts from Baghdad. I have been sending Chanie letters via the U.S. Special Forces were run into coming through the camps.
I realize that G-d or no G-d, Abdullah Ocalan is writing about a universal truth. This is the last stand. The last chance we will ever have or get again.
“Deash is all wiped out,” the Commander repeats, “BUT THE TURKISH ARMY IS COMING FOR SURE. To burn all we have built to the ground,” he sighs, “Serkaften, we will fight them too!”
We all probably have a lot more bleeding left to do no matter what happens.
“It was only that we believed that in this transience, this short human life, it was preferable to die on one’s feet moving towards a just idea. Moving in solidarity, in defense of the powerless. Then it would be to die on our backs or our knees, half-lives, shuffling along like zombies. Always asleep. With meaningless, un-free lives wasted. Lives were spent like wallowing serfs and base slaves.”
Have you ever had an amazing noble idea in your head? That simply refused to translate itself or find traction in reality? Have you ever risked everything, sacrificed absolutely everything for such an idea? Myopically, almost psychotically pushing forward in the face of a stubborn, intractable cruel reality. When you can, bring yourself to do that. To engage in nothing short of overwhelming zealotry. Pursuing a new reality, a reality where the vast suffering of this world is mitigated. Where the chaos and carnage and daily humiliation that is the lot of most humans is undone by rights, by hope, by heroism. That is called the “motivation for the fight”.
It has been a very long hard bloody road to the mountains and back from them. From Manhattan to Jerusalem to Havana. All the trips to the City of Port-Au-Prince. To Greater Boston. Back to Brooklyn then to Russia. Across Russia on a train then into the Middle East to fight in Rojava27. Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Egypt and then back to the Big Apple again. Riding on the backs of armored trucks and flying carpets. On horses, on tanks, on airships. Over the great rivers and through the woods. Mountains beyond mountains beyond mountains. With stopovers where all civilization has come to a resolute end in the Fertile Crescent. Smoldering villages. Enormous cities razed to the very foundations. Once historic places, simply crushed and undone. Burning down river by river shore to deep sands of desolation. A revolution within a civil war within an endless third world war. A place called Kurdistan which exists not on maps but in the hearts and dreams of perhaps forty million stateless, long oppressed people. Engaged in a very long fight for their right to exist.
How do you make any sense of such carnage to people that were not there? How do you make an enjoyable narrative about bloody chaos? Articulate ideas that when they become facts on the ground, have vast contradictions. Have improbable capability to survive.
My name is Sebastian Adonaev, but the Kurds named me “Blacksmith Winter”, or Kawa Zivistan. The Arabs needed to name me too in a way familiar to them, so they called me “Abu Yazan”. Because my then-part-girlfriend, part-confidant Polina has a son named Yazan. I was 33 when I was deployed but looked and felt a bit younger. I felt brave or stupid enough to volunteer for a war. At the most desperate heights of the conflict, which would end up killing over 500,000 people, there was a cry for some extra hands, some Hamsas. Every side called up all available reinforcements. Just before Baghdad almost fell, the mostly Shiite al-Hashid ash-Shabi Popular Mobilization Forces called up half a million Iraqis to hold I.S.I.S. back. The Assad Regime enlisted thousands of Russians, Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah28 to fight Daesh and other Sunni rebel factions aligned with ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Free Syrian Army brands and the Al Qaeda reboot H.T.S. The so-called Islamic State took in over 40,000 foreign fighters and the mostly Kurdish forces in the “Syrian Democratic Forces” enlisted just 500. I fought alongside the Iraqi Special Operations Forces in Iraq and for the Syrian Democratic Forces, in the Y.P.G. Militia defending the idea of Rojava in Syria. I contributed very few bullets, mostly serving as combat medic during my time there. Mostly stopping hemorrhage and carrying the wounded to ambulances. Mostly trying to train people to save lives at a time when almost everyone wanted to kill.
“After defeating the so-called “Islamic State” as a force holding any territory, the United States military all but completely abandoned their Kurdish allies and Turkey invaded Rojava. Yet, she did not fall.”
We who survived to talk about the Syrian Civil War, we often found there were not easy words to describe what we took part in. At least not in English. This is a story grounded in history and ideology. The tale of a stateless people spread over 4 nations, over 40 million strong. This is a love song after a series of hard fucks in Spanish and some love making in Russian. This is a Post-Soviet Lullaby, written in Imperial English about Western privileges. I have heard on the wire that the Turkish Army is fully mobilizing to crush Rojava. A fully modern army of over 435,000 soldiers. That Anya is losing her mind in Baghdad and Ana Campbell, that optimistic young woman I once gave hand grenades to, well she died in an airstrike in Afrin29. Here I am in Capitalist Modernity’s very heartland and loving embrace. Doing nothing useful for Kurdistan. Just writing stupid love songs. Composing vain self-serving propaganda plays.
I am not sure exactly what I am supposed to hide and what I can give away. I’m very detached from Western thinking, so I don’t know what makes compelling propaganda in the West anyway. Actually, the sly and looming enemy knows most of our real names, and frankly there were many informants amongst us, it is simply a matter of sad fact that to get their passports back many of the French and British volunteers gave us away. Not to snitch jacket, but with a little lean on anyone can make a person flip. Really, there were not that many of us internationalists to keep track of. As the mad China-man Heval Andok said, “the hard drives containing our data were barely even secured and this place is awash in spies.” Our overall numbers were estimated to be around 500 strong of which around 50 later perished. Mostly in combat, some in a wave of alleged suicides. We were small enough therefore for the various security services to keep track of.
So, what is the actual purpose of this little manuscript? It is certainly not to glorify or denigrate the volunteers. I think it’s brave we went there but I don’t think we changed a single thing. Perhaps we were all only there to bear witness that the revolution has even happened. It is surely not my aim to give away military secrets and name names, because I am many things but not a Josh, a ‘donkey ass betrayer’. Suffice to say the CIA, MI630 and the MIT.31 have all our names.
HEVAL JANSHER
“I heard some comrades sang like little opera singers to get their European passports back. All speculation, no one can actually say. Americans, you have the easiest deal. After ISIS32 is finished, maybe it will not be so black and white, fighting a N.A.T.O. ally and what not.”
Assisting a revolution for stateless democracy, women’s emancipation and social ecology in the heart of the war-torn Middle East. ‘Heval Ciya’33 the Scotsman always used to say that the 231 Sniper Unit changed the entire game, but only the United States and the Coalition airstrikes probably, certainly did. When the last of the under 2,500 U.S. Special Forces leave the Turks will invade in force and try to undo everything. There’s a story we heard about a Y.P.G.34 Euro volunteer vacationing in Turkey immediately after his tour. He was of course arrested and will serve life in prison. He probably should have made better choices for leave and decompression. There are lots of crazy people here. You must be little crazy to travel halfway across the earth to enlist in a revolution inside a bloody brutal civil war amid a great power confrontation placing Russia and Iran directly against the United States and N.A.T.O35. I was told by ‘Heval Jansher’ the Y.P.G. guerrilla who helped train us that, if I survive the war I should “write something about Rojava that does justice to the over 12,000 martyrs. That does justice to the cause of Kurdistan36. Honors Abdullah Ocalan37 and upholds the values of the revolution.” That it should humanize this resistance struggle inside a revolution inside a civil war inside a great game for the Middle East.
JANSHER
“Maybe Heval, just make it a kind of strange fucked up love story! Call it; A MIDDLE EASTERN WESTERN! Then allude to something grand and wholly revolutionary!”
Jansher joked with me over cigarettes and endless black tea. He probably would never have cursed publicly. As he was living a life of “unlimited modesty”. So, I hope this account manages some of that, compiling the oral history, experiences and many martyrdoms shared amongst the approximate 500-600 foreign Y.P.G./Y.P.J./I.F.B.38 Internationalist fighters. At the very least I’d like to capture what it was that made us enlist in this hell to take part, to fight and die and kill and try and help, to be less than a footnote in the epic tale of Kurdistan. But still a part of a part.
JANSHER
“It must be a love story, or they will never make a movie about it, comrade! To the West without a Movie, it is perhaps like this struggle is not even happening at all.”
But he also said things like:
“A ‘real revolutionist’ has no love except for his or her people. Any romantic love, or sexual yearning is a bourgeois luxury. For civilians, actually. A Kadro moves beyond the physical temptations of life, not because they are sinful or weak. They are just weakening to a revolutionary militant. Distracting the focus, one must maintain motivation for our fight”.
“Our love story is for the Resistance of the Age” he used to say, but then Heval Jansher also laughed and noted that Heval Actor Jake Gyllenhaal was then already shopping around a script where he plays an anarchist falling in love for a beautiful Y.P.J. fighter and another action exploitation of the Y.P.J. was coming out soon in France.
JANSHER
“But that will likely not go anywhere useful. By the time it comes out we will all be dead, or have achieved victory, actually.” He always punctuates or punctuates his thoughts with “actually”.
JANSHER
You see Heval, in real life we would probably platform and deport this stupid volunteer and the Y.P.J. comrade, she would be shamed and sent briefly to prison” Heval Jansher told me. A famous saying states that the “Kurds have no friends besides the mountains.” Well, that’s no longer completely true. The 600 who served and the 45 who died besides the 12,000 Kurdish and Arab martyrs of the battle to defeat ISIS and defend the Rojava Revolution will live forever in the Kurdish tradition, since in Kurdistan ‘Martyrs never die’. Shahid Namarin.
These were the kinds of little talks we had at theQerechow Academy. Like a father and son seated on the floor of a small office, in a tiny outpost at the end of the world.
That said, this is not a love story at all. It’s not even “a Middle Eastern Western”. The revolution itself has hardly been secured. The struggle is hardly over. The iron heel and might of the Turkish army looms right over the border to the North. Ready to descend quickly and murder us all. Undo everything that has been fought for against the so-called Islamic State. The Forces of the bloody dictator Assad backed by the Russian army and Hezbollah dig into the south of the Euphrates River. The collaborationist Iraqi Kurdish K.D.P. Peshmerga, the Iranian supported Hashid Ashabi popular mobilization forces, the Shi’a dominated Iraqi Army and all manners of Iranian revolutionary guards to the southeast in Sinjar. To the West the Jihadists of Al Qaeda’s latest rebrand and Islamists of different types in Idlib.
ADONAEV
“Enemies of the revolution on every single side!”
In fulfilling my promises, I will present our little part of the story as the defense has only just begun. Everything might be wiped away before you even paid attention to the vastness and hope of it. I worry, no, sadly I expect, that long before this manuscript is ever published anywhere, all will be lost. My remaining Hevals will all likely be killed.
The Turkish Army will roll over the border and everyone will be slaughtered. This isn’t speculation, since it happened many times before.
Flaming, low-lying wreckage spreads out before us in every direction. The ruins of an already desolated land. Sprawling two-story compounds along a mighty river. Pock marked with rifle rounds. Misery found everywhere. Syria is now a byword for total warfare, over 600,000 have so far died. A Revolution in a Civil War. A Third World War using several dozen proxy armies is underway. Russia, Iran, China, America, and Europe all have their boots on the ground. In Northern Syria, an unrecognized administration in three cantons protects 4 million civilians and internal refugees. A Kurdish lead project for democracy, ethnic pluralism, women’s empowerment, and something called ‘social ecology’. The sun bakes you and the dust gets into absolutely everything.
HEVAL CHIYA19
In Deir Ez-Zor Province, a wasteland along the North bank of the Euphrates, in a few hundred hamlets, from their ‘capitals’ in Raqqa and Mosul, Iraq the most hateful and radical of Islamic fascists rules over 10 million persons. Some happily embrace its Caliph Baghdadi as the fulfillment of prophecy. Over 50,000 Muslim Jihadists from around the world arrived to reinforce this effort. At its maximum the Islamic State occupied massive swaths of Eastern Syria and Northwestern Iraq, threatening to capture Baghdad and Damascus.
Deir Ez-Zor was one of the very first Syrian cities in 2011 to stage large scale demonstrations against the Assad Regime. In 2014 ISIS took over the city with little resistance leaving only a small pocket of pro-Assad military and over 100,000 civilian supporters cut off in an airbase and small section of the city. Supplied by helicopters and high altitude drop services, the besieged garrison deep inside the ISIS control zone resisted capture for over 3 years and 2 months.
The siege of Deir Ez-Zor Airbase garrison lasted an exceedingly long time. ‘Daesh’ controlled everything except a small military airport which the Russians and Regime supplied by air for all of the war, but could not re-take, along with the city until just a month ago when it was “liberated” on 3rd November 2017 by the SAA and the Russians.
At some point the Regime soldiers made the local women trade sex for basic rations of food. There were rarely sympathetic forces in the war, besides ours. But even if the Y.P.G. is conscripting children, forcing Arabs off their lands, and dabbling in occasional war crimes from time to time, to time. Now, on the South bank, Assad Regime forces, Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary guards and Russian special forces push southeast down the southern bank of the river while Syrian Democratic Forces and United States lead coalition forces pushed rapidly south to the Euphrates North bank, both sides maneuvering to secure the majority of the Syrian oil fields. The S.D.F. capture most of them. Now we slowly begin the final offensive to capture Isis’s last strongholds, moving down the river toward Hajin. Trying not to kick off World War Three.
“Perhaps I am not where I am supposed to be,” muses Heval Ciya, “Perhaps here, I will die for nothing useful at all. We can be killed so easily by anything, then they will dance about with my corpse making speeches in Kurmanji for a day, until my death takes on significance that it probably never had.” It seems like every other day; a man wanders off and steps on something and explodes. The mines are everywhere, can’t be understated. You should try to never walk anywhere you have never seen someone else walk.
Heval Ciya Zinar is the name they gave me. “Comrade Friend Mountain Rock”. I am a separatist minded Scottish Soldier. Although still a member of the British army, I voted for independence in our latest failed referendum. I am a gentleman by most accounts and a Y.P.G. International Volunteer. I have no political sympathies with the Kurdish lead formations, though I possess formal military training, making me more valuable than most of these preachy, useless ideologically motivated volunteers.
“There’s dust in my beard and men die all around me!” exclaims Heval Ciya from Scotland.
As we grew closer to the Euphrates, we could see fire in the sky and the night is lit up with heavy coalition airstrikes somewhere far away to the south. The convoy of nine trucks had left Al Hasakah20, the largest rebel held city in the morning and drove about five hours south toward some forward operating base. The eight of us internationals had not been issued weapons until halfway to the front. We stopped of course several times for obligatory tea and some volleyball. The sport of ‘Apoist’ revolution. Sometimes we’d stop at what seemed like the same identical storefront kiosk, next to well stocked pharmacies. The road bodega of Kurdistan is stocked with energy drinks, smokes, and Turkish day to day items, never toilet paper. All the toilet paper in Syria was now gone. There we bought energy drinks and cigarettes of a more potent type, as the party issued Ardens were lights or ultra lights at best. There were tons of canned Pepsi, but no Coca-Cola throughout the liberated zones. Real freedom evidently has not been won yet.
In the first battle that I participated in during the Syrian Civil War five Arab soldiers in our S.D.F./ Y.P.G. Unit were blown to bits by mines and mortars as we stormed the river basin a little after midnight. Evidently, there were far more Daesh entrenched than we had thought. From a dirt sand trench, I fired my AK-47 shiftlessly over the wall, peaking out I saw an Arab comrade ripped apart by gun fire and collapse in the sand.
The fire fight resumed immediately after a short re-calibration of the battle plan, after Heval Commander Dalil’s men were buried. A larger number of Kasadeh21were trucked in, barely trained. Half or more might have fought for Daesh or the Regime at some point. Child soldiers all over the place. A major conscription drive happened, even some cadro tabors were moved in. This was a race to secure as much turf north of the Euphrates as we could as quickly as we could, creating a defensible buffer against the regime, Russians and Iranians to secure the oil fields. Of course, implicit in all that was to finish Daesh for good. Smash their final positions along 60 to 100 hamlets and miserable dust cake boney towns leading to Hajin, for the very last stand of the caliphate.
Very bad intelligence friends! The bandits were still very well dug in, refugees were swarming out and among them suicide bombers. Five so far. it was impossible to know anymore who was Daesh or not among the refugees flooding out. Some two dozen Arab Hevals were martyred the first night of the operation. We were down to the hardcore of the elite, the foreign fighter zealots, their families. Motorcycles with snipers affixed to reposition. Sleeper cell deployment, suicide bombers, booby traps, tunnel mines, the usual. Now they would in four battalions capture about fifty tiny key destitute towns working south in several prongs toward the river.
“If you see a helicopter, don’t shoot at it!” Dalal had said, it was our new resupply drop copters. We allegedly had a very, very small air force now. “Do not shoot at the helicopters in general,” was repeated several times in Arabic and Kurdish. “Also, also! If the regime forces fire, return fire, but do not engage them. Unless they cross the river. Declared Commander Heval Brusk, which means ‘commander lightning’. Commander lightning then personally presided over a few hours on conscript drills. None of these bearded partisans were trusted with grenades.
So, the very next day, at early dawn, ten of the destitution ridden little seemingly strategic ISIS hamlets were again stormed. There was chaotic gun fire erupting everywhere. There were utterly ransacked two story brown buildings all unfinished, all about the same shattered look. From several positions Takim22commandos were firing endlessly from roof tops and sniper holes out toward where it was believed the enemy was hiding. A mosque about half a kilometer away. Well of course every Daesh position was in a mosque, hospital or granary since nothing else was defensible. This was a mostly one-sided AK-47 and mortar barrage. Much of the war had proceeded like this, pickup trucks dripping light infantry to storm abandoned Arab homes and light up anything that moved. Loot absolutely anything that wasn’t made of sand and carry it back north. One pipe, one water basin, one carpet at a time. A small child runs out into the road and is blown away. Briefly a pause, until he is clearly limp and dead. A day or two more of endless AK fire, sometimes at night too. Eventually the Americans were told to bomb the mosque. Spotters transmit grid coordinates. Soon, about 5 minutes later an airstrike rips apart the mosque. Battle won!
Many people have written at length about “how boring” it can be to be at war, but it is more terrifying than boring, Heval. You do your best to not think about how men and women far more prepared than yourself took a wrong turn and then just exploded. Or how a sniper cut them down. Or how they died in a Turkish airstrike. Or contracted hepatitis because of poor local appreciation of pooping with toilet paper and hand washing, then eating.
“The boredom of war Heval is perhaps a cover for a sneaking debilitating fear. A pervasive feeling you will not make it out alive,” so that is what people sometimes write about who write about war. Being bored, instead of often being afraid. And in a war, such as this certainly you sit around quite a lot drinking tea, smoking weak Party issued cigarettes and standing guard. Or looking for strategic places to jerk off or poop without setting off a mine. But nothing for us was the same for very long and thus all the time you spent sitting around was better spent ‘conversating’ on the Revolution’s bleak future, or studying some Kurdish, or horsing around with the Arabs. Who loved to try and communicate actually. And show you pornography and awkwardly try and steal, trade for or buy your hand grenades. Or ask you to bring them to America or Europe hidden in a bag. Jokes abound, but really it is only you who will be brought back to Europe or America in a bag. While very few of us spoke any real Kurmanji Kurdish23 or Arabic, it seemed that the Arabs were far more interested in us than the Kurds though. I would call the Kurdish commander’s attitude, begrudging appreciation and that of the rank-and-file borderline insulting. I would go so far as to say that at this stage in the war, being fought in majority Arab zones now by the Euphrates River that an increasing number of the front-line fighters were Kasadeh24, non-Kurdish Arab S.D.F. fighters. The Assyrians too had a small group, less than a few hundred men, many little kids and old men. Many poorly trained and poorly paid semi conscripts. Many were not even very against the Islamic State, more eager to shoot at the Russians and regime forces on the other side of the river. With the Kadros25being withheld in clear preparation for the impending defense of Afrin Canton.
In retrospect I assume that Heval Fermander Dalil26 probably saved our lives by abandoning us in a rear fox hole in the dead of night. The ten internationalists that I was aware of were placed further back in the rear, but Heval Shervan ‘the crazed Irish gypsy’ commandeered a Humvee and caught us up, without any invitation to the troops of “Fermander Dalil”.
I remember freezing out in the dunes all night long while the Arab fighters shared neither bedding nor blanket. It was so bitterly G-d damn cold! Sometimes Heval Kawa, the idealistic New Yorker, and I talk about the girls back home. I will talk about my Ms. Ashley. He talks about his “Goldy”. Some escort Russian he has some arty muse thing with. Pretty much this is what men at war do. Although in my case, I motorboated my female best friend. In his case it seems a bit more fucking dark and tragic.
“Sometimes I close my eyes and remember your lips. Late into the long trip back to Brighton to your so-called home. I have no home, only ugly little flats around Brooklyn soviet which I rent out of poverty, artless and shared. Decorated with trinkets. I’ll never go back! To you or to Russia, or Haiti, nor to Mehanata the tavern or even dear Cuba! All these things are a form of slavery now. Your lingering Daria, it takes the form of ruminations on WhatsApp messages telling me to “come home”. But to what? To nothing. Life here is hard, but it is free life as they say.”
Kawa, the so-called American, is more a poet than a medic in his heart of hearts. Me? I am simply a Scottish warrior. I long for the fight and I got some.
I was deployed into the Deir Ez-Zor Province wastelands about ten days ago to the front near Omar, Daesh is nearly completely defeated they say, but every day we are taking martyr bodies back to Al-Hasaka. Assigned briefly to the Tabor Shahid Lawrence; we lost fifty men in the first few battles to advance south on the mighty Euphrates River. After all that initial death it seems they aim to break up our group of internationalists into different places. They do not want us all to die at once. They do not really seem to have achieved consensus or a plan on where we should be or when and if we should die, or what we are even good for. Or what to do when ISIS is finished, and America abandons them, and the Turkish Army rolls over the border to kill us all. A heated internal debate is constantly held in both Turkish and Kurdish. Sometimes also in Arabic. Which always ends inconclusively. Well, its a complex matter anyway. So many ways to die out here for the greatest cause of our time.
On this matter Kawa and I agree that whatever motives brought us all to this wasteland, this place of dying and suffering over made up Gods and ideologies, invented ethnicities and World War three style great power politics; this was the resistance of the age. This was a battle between good men, bad men and crazy men who could not sit out. Because when the smoke clears there will be a different Middle East, a different world. I am no ideologue. I am no dreamer or religious fanatic. I am a professional soldier. While it is not unreasonable to say the Assad Regime backed by Russia and Iran, the Turks, Al Qaeda and of course the Daesh, are unequivocal forces of religious fanatical reaction, of fascism, or totalitarianism and death, well they are. While the Kurds and Arabs of Y.P.G./Y.P.J./S.D.F. are not saints of course. We are not angels here to help do some God’s work. We are fighting for democracy, feminism, ecology and tolerance in the heart of the Middle East. As opposed to all the other groups that are fighting for radical Islam, chauvinism, fascism and the right to impose the will of the minority on the majority.
“Did you know that when you take off a person’s uniform to bury them, you cannot tell a fascist corpse, from a democratic corpse, from a Daesh corpse, not even from the length of the beard?”
Those three and letter affiliations, they do not matter anyway. It matters more, the stuff inside a person’s heart. Their moral compass. Not the length of the beard or who they pray to. Not the historic struggle of their people or their claim to the rivers. When true warriors die, they might not end up anywhere glorious. They might just be dead. The “immortality” we are achieving in our death here is thus rooted in the way the story is framed. Which is to say, whoever wins the war. But can you really win a revolution inside a civil war, inside a World War? I see no good ending in sight. We will all get killed ingloriously. But there is of course a timeless epic glory for young men of all cultures to join an impossible battle, risk their lives and join a pantheon of immortal heroes. Of course, the Arabs, Assyrians, Kurds, Turks, Chechens, Turkmen, Persians and all the other micro-ethnic tribes gathered here to make war, well they sadly all have no choices. These are the oil rich, strategic holy lands and mountains they were cursed perhaps by their gods to be born in.
How did we even get here? How did this motley group of around 800 mostly Western foreigners take up the cause of Kurdistan?
Well, it began with a letter of introduction. As well as four short pamphlets that were written by the Uncle Leader himself, while serving twenty-one years in solitary confinement on the Turkish prison island of Imrali. These pamphlets attempt to paraphrase thousands and thousands of handwritten theoretical documents smuggled out by his lawyers from Imrali. The name if this 8-volume treatise are called alternatively “Democratic Confederalism” or “the Defenses of Abdullah Ocalan.” Taken as a body of ideology these writings translated into Kurmanji, Sorani, German, French, English, Spanish and Farsi from Turkish for the theoretical basis for the military and political objectives of the Party.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 