/nû/أبو Riah

Today is the anniversary of the siege of Kobani, and I can’t help but remember those who sacrificed their lives for a dream that seems so far away now. One of them was Serhat Kendal. He had such a magnetic personality. You wouldn’t have guessed he was 15 if not for his stature. He had a way about him, that he would brighten the room. Once, we were advancing when a heavy fog fell on us, so thick we couldn’t see ten steps ahead. We were hoping ISIS wouldn’t take the chance to launch a counteroffensive, because without air support we’d have been helpless. We were already overstretched outside the city, pushing through the countryside to regain the river and the land between it. We didn’t have the men to put up a fight. Every squad had been gutted, combat-veterans redistributed, sometimes one or two per squad, sometimes none. And those squads were asked to advance. Kendal wasn’t in my squad. He roamed free across the battlefield with his PKM on his shoulder and a radio to keep track of the front, and he’d show up at whim. That day he was stuck with my team, holding a building in a fog engulfed village. Suddenly a building went up in flames 200 meters away. Kendal screamed the name of a friend who was part of the unit holding it. Somehow he knew where everyone was. He was from Kobani, after all. And he sprang up and just ran alone toward it without a clue of awaited beyond the mist. It could have been an ambush. Or the thousand forms of death surrounding us all. Another time, we were all ducking, bullets whizzing over our heads. We didn’t even know where the shots were coming from, but the whizzing was relentless and we couldn’t help but duck. When I got to the berm, Kendal was already on his PKM, flicking his finger on the trigger, one round at a time, returned to sender. That’s the last time I saw him. My squad was sent down to the Euphrates. We were stuck there for two weeks, under heavy and incessant rain that made tatters of whatever was left of our morale. The fighting was over. We had secured the river bank, Kobani was free. I said my goodbyes and asked to be sent back, for the first time since the beginning of the siege. On the way back I was redeployed with a sniper unit. The platoon commander, Hardem Rojhelat, who later became an icon of Kobani’s resistence, sent me, as part of a trio of marksmen to one of the most frightening positions I was ever in: the Turkish army on one side, ISIS on the other, and us sandwiched between them. The day before I arrived, ISIS had counterattacked and left the units there shattered in spirit and body. They called it the front of death. The comrades there were waiting for one more assault to finish them off. They were no reinforcements available, so they got a sniper team. We stayed another month, fighting it out. Then I went home. A few months later I came back to news that broke my heart. Kendal was dead. As many others Hardem included. But Kobani was free now, with electricity and life returning. My former sniper partner, Azad Cudi, who wrote the acclaimed Long Shot, drove me around. He had become an important figure, with his own car and chauffeur. I asked him what had happened to my fallen friends. He didn’t know. He drove me around quite a lot, I didn’t know, but I had become quite the local celebrity when the news of the Italian who fought in the hottest fronts of Kobani did the rounds, once those who fought with me, went back to recount the tale. One those rounds landed us to Mala Shahid, the House of Martyrs, where they organize funerals, demos and family outreach. During the meeting, I asked the secretary for help. I by chance had a paper with two names written on them: Kendal and Sefkan. I had seen their posters on a big billboard in Kobani, and that’s how I learned they were both dead. I wrote down their full names, and still carried that piece of paper days past. 1/2