Memories from Kobanê Part I

My name is Sorxwîn Rojhilat, I will tell you a little about my memories from Kobanê. The Kobanê war is something you can report, write and talk about as much as you like, but you will never finish.

Every friend who was there has their own experiences and stories. You can tell so much about each friend, about their willingness to sacrifice, it would take hours or days.

But I will tell you a little about it now and keep it short.

 

Coming to Rojava

My crossing into Rojava and arrival in Kobanê was at the beginning of the war in Kobanê. Of course, I had already heard about Rojava and wondered what life was like in Rojava. I came when Kobanê was in a critical situation. At that time, the Turkish president spoke on television every day and said: ‘The last hour of Kobanê has come’. That’s why I made the decision that I wanted to go to Kobanê. It’s important to understand the Turkish state’s policy at the time. They say we came without notice and they didn’t know anything, but that’s not true. When we came, we were a very large group of comrades who wanted to cross the border. And there were also the Turkish soldiers and their convoy consisted of about 50-60 men. Our group and the Turkish military arrived at the barbed wired border at the same time. So we also clashed there. But we were unarmed, empty-handed so to speak. We all tried to lift the NATO barbed wire and climb through, but because it was NATO wire, it had razor-sharp blades and most of our comrades got stuck in it. A Turkish soldier said to me: ‘Go on over, you’ll be killed anyway.’

Kobanê and the International Complot

When he said this, I understood that that this was not just a plot by Daesh to take Kobanê. It was a continuation of the international plot that was enforced here with the Turkish soldiers, their insults and beatings. Daesh may have started the attacks, but this is not separate from the plot against Abdullah Öcalan in 1999. It is a new form of complot, adapted to the current political situation. Until now, the conspiracy was aimed at one person, namely Rêber Apo, but now they want to use this form to extend the complot to an entire nation because they have not yet been able to achieve their goal. I realised that there and then. The population came to our aid at the time. They told us that everyone had run away, fled and that it was too late. Kobanê was empty, there were only four or five people left and they had also made their way to the border today and wanted to cross it and leave the city. And the people said to us, are you crazy, why do you want to go there? And they even tried to block our way so that we couldn’t cross. They didn’t want anything to happen to us or for us to be killed. The people tried to persuade us not to go, because there was nothing left of the city, Kobanê had fallen. One elderly father in particular tried to persuade me to stop. But I just said to him, do you know a better movement than the Kurdistan Freedom Movement? He said no. I assured him that the movement knew exactly what it was sending us there for. Would the freedom movement send its militants there for nothing if there was nothing to try? And I told him not to stop us, to clear the way for us so that we could cross. Whether it’s lost or not is up to us, but they should let us through. I had exchanged a few words back and forth with him, but then we just crossed over.

Rain of fire

It was so difficult when we crossed the NATO barbed wire and the Turkish soldiers beat us. Many of our comrades were injured on their hands, faces and legs. We crossed about 15 metres of barbed wire, the soldiers beat us with sticks, there were some wounded among us. We were stuck in the blades of the wire, our shoes, clothes or backpacks got caught in it and it was difficult to get free, the more you pulled on it, the more skin or flesh got caught in it. And there wasn’t a single stone in the area that we could have used to defend ourselves. The enemy was set upon us and there was only earth and nothing we could have used for our defence. That was of course a big mistake, I already said at the time that it wasn’t right for us to go to the other side in such a situation without self-defence. When we ran up a hill and shouted to each other: ‘defend yourselves, throw earth if you have to’. The Turkish soldiers understood us in Kurdish and they drove away in their armoured cars and retreated. We hadn’t expected the tear gas. When we ran across, I was on a path with the comrades and both sides of the path were mined, only this one path was cleared of mines so that we could cross the border there and we had to take exactly this path. Our courier had warned us about this, he said that if you go off the path to the left you will step on mines and there are also mines on the right, you have to make sure you always stay straight on the path so that you don’t step on a mine. And when we met the enemy there for the first time, they attacked so much with tear gas and beatings. For many of our comrades it was the first time they came into contact with tear gas grenades, for me too. I had seen such tear gas grenades on TV and heard about them being used, but it was the first time that I came into contact with them face to face. When we attacked them back, they moved away and our comrades came to help from the other side, so we had opened the NATO barbed wire and we tried to cross the wire with the help of our shoes and backpacks.

We had reached the path, but now the tear gas grenades were being thrown at us, and it wasn’t two, three, ten or twenty, no. They had thrown them at us all the way from the border, maybe fifty times, and they used different calibres. One comrade was hit in the head, he fell to the ground, they hit someone else in the arm and he had a broken hand. Everything felt like burns, your hands, your face, everywhere you touched was burning like fire. So many of us comrades were plagued by dizziness, we ran away, it was a plain and we had nowhere to protect ourselves. We picked up the comrades who couldn’t run and carried them with us. That is the spirit of the comrades in the PKK, that you never leave someone behind. I can say that this crossing and coming to Kobanê was much more difficult for me than the actual Kobanê war. I mean that seriously. Why do I say that? Because we were burnt all over by these gas canisters and our eyes, nose and mouth were all burning, we cried such tears that only water flowed. It all came together. The worst thing was that when you shook hands with your comrades, your hands burned even more, such a strange gas was used.

Arriving in Kobanê

The sounds of tanks, Kalashnikovs and mortar shells were everywhere. You no longer knew whether to crawl, duck or walk upright, because it was everywhere. However, that was the situation when we came to Kobanê. It was 3 o’clock at night when we crossed over to Kobanê and because it was so dark we couldn’t recognise the comrades who picked us up. They took us by car to a place where there was war and said, here, this is Kobanê, you’ve arrived now. So we arrived. The YPG comrades were now approaching us on our side and they had brought a dojka, which they had placed some distance away from us so that they could shoot over our heads at the Turkish soldiers, who therefore had to retreat. This allowed us to break through and reach our comrades, who welcomed us. They then took us to Kobanê.

After crossing the border, the fact that you know that you are now on the side of Kobanê, it felt like a big fire was lit insight. We call this rain of fire a rain of violence. It slowly hit the ground and burned everything. The bullets were fired from everywhere and the sky was in flames like there was lightning.

The friends picked us up in cars and taken us to a certain place. The car we were in got tangled up in one of the barbed wires and three tyres burst. So we had to abandon the car and walk a distance, then we came to a car that people had abandoned when they fled to Bakûr. Our driver got into the car, short-circuited the ignition cables and the car started and we continued in this car. That’s how we arrived at our base, I’ve already described how it was getting towards dawn and we were greeted by the sounds of war. Our comrades got as far as us, they responded to the sounds of war and they had many different weapons with them. They cleared a channel so that they could reach us. Those who knew Kobanê at that time or experienced it themselves know how self-sacrificing the comrades were back then, there was only a very small unit in Kobanê, we were a very under-proportioned force, but with very strong conviction. There were actually not many units, but the friends who remained there had a strong willingness to sacrifice themselves and they continued to fight well. And here we met- almost all of us were wounded somewhere from the difficult crossing with tear gas grenades, some were injured in the hands, arms, legs, head, others with broken limbs and so on. We were a force of 22 comrades. I had brought them with me from Botan. That same night we reorganised our comrades and handed over the letters we had with us to the Kobanê coordination team, the commanders in charge here were Heval Melsa and Heval Narîn Efrîn. We split in two groups, the women comrades on one side in a room that was open at the top and the men in another room. We tried to sleep with our backs against the wall until morning and get some rest.

This war is like a young horse

Then a mortar shell came flying towards the house next to us, we were half dozing when the projectile hit the neighbour building and all our windows and doors shook and splintered. Earth and stones flew through the air towards us. Our comrades took us out and we moved to a house further back. It was getting dark and we took the women comrades to other women comrades and the men comrades to the other men comrades. I didn’t see them again, because they were directly brought to the front by Heval Ferzan. There was no resting, arriving first or tending to wounds. There was no question of guests, we arrived that morning and were immediately distributed to our new places. Another group arrived the same night, ­we were about 150 new comrades in total. So the new assignments were made. First, ever comrade got a weapon and ammunition belt and then they were distributed to the various bases.

The group I had brought here was now completely split up and I stayed behind and first went to Hevala Melsa and Hevala Narîn Efrîn. They had called me to the coordination centre at around two or three o’clock and I started by listening to the radio. They had four five telephones and radios and these rang continuously, they passed on messages about who had come from where, where they had been attacked etc. They hadn’t gotten up from their seats since the early morning. I listened to that for a while. It was all about various tekmîls about Şehadets, explosions, no more ammunition or weapons, wounded or tekmîls about where attacks and reinforcements were needed, who was to be moved where and so on. It was such a mess that when a person listened to it from the outside, their brain just switched off. I was only there for a short time, I wanted to rest for five minutes, but that was impossible here, so I went into a back room of Heval Melsa and Narîn and tried to relax a little first. But that was really almost impossible with all the noise and commotion here. That was the situation. I listened to these Tekmîls from midday until early the next morning to get an insight into the situation. And I can say that on that day I understood the war situation well. What is war, what level has it reached and what is our situation? When I listened to the radios until the early morning, I understood the movements, where the enemy is, and what our overall tactical situation is.

I understood that night and I said to myself, this war is like a young horse that is being retrained and has to learn how to move, how to carry a load, how to be ridden and that leads to pain all the time. That was our situation, until you can finally ride the horse. And when you’ve taught it how to walk, how to carry the load and you’re riding it, then you make very easy progress, but until you’ve taught it this, it throws itself on the ground, throws you off, breaks itself or you, sometimes even its own head. A horse that has slipped out of our hands. It has slipped away from us, it is running away. Whoever tries to stop it and throw themselves on it will have their arm or leg, head or spirit broken. I said to the comrades that it is now very important that we first make a tactical decision. What tactics can we use to catch the horse that has escaped and bring it back under our control so that we can load it up and run with it?

No more Guerilla clothes – Heval Gelhat

Early in the morning, I saw that a friend from another group came to me, it was Şehîd Gelhat. And Heval Gelhat came to me and said I heard that the group from Cudî Mountain arrived. We both knew each other from the Cudî region, we were both commanders there at the time, I was in charge of a small group and he was the regional commander. We were responsible together in Cudî for a long time, he came to Kobanê just a few days before us.

He came to me and said he had heard that the Cudî group had arrived and he asked me who I had brought with me. He was still standing at the door, slippers on his feet and made jokes about me, because I had come over in civilian clothes. He teased me in Turkish and said, that’s how I see you in civilian clothes and I just replied, that’s how you came over back then, that’s how we came over now. That’s how the moment and the time wants us to be. He said the time of the guerrilla uniform is over, but now you look much younger in your new clothes. You look much smaller in the civilian clothes, where is your special attitude from the time with the guerrilla clothing? What is it that shows up here in the war again, its the spirit of friendship, Hevaltî.

We met that very night, early in the morning, and he asked if I had brought along my young friend Heval Botan, who was also in Cudî at the time? Heval Botan was with Heval Gelhat in Cudî at the time and was maybe 15-16 years old. I then gave him all the names, Heval Mîran, Heval Xalîd, and when I mentioned the name of Heval Botan, he paused for a moment and asked me: “Why did you bring Heval Botan? How did you convince him to come?” I said Heval Mîzgîn said go with her and go back to Heval Gelhat. He asked me: “But didn’t you think anything of it, Heval Sorxwîn, that you brought him here with you?” I told him that I didn’t think much of it, because I didn’t know what the situation was like here and now we can’t change it. He took him in, he spoke of ‘kalpî’, ‘kanîya-kurdan’, ‘şêxî’ and so on, but that didn’t mean anything to me at the time. He said there is a place here that we call ‘Kaniya-Kobanê’, which means something like the source of Kobanê. And that belongs to the ‘şêxî’ region and you should tell the comrades that you would like to be sent to me in the ‘şêxî’ region. I agreed. That was the end of our conversation, he left again, but we had seen each other briefly that night.

“Don’t fall for three days” – Heval Melsa

I didn’t say anything to the comrades. ‘Şêxî’ was one of the most important and most difficult places, because the enemy was trying to enclosure us there. The fiercest war was being waged there. And because we knew each other from before, knew we can both fight well in this area and lead the operation, I had agreed. And so a little time passed, it was around 4 o’clock and Heval Meryem [Melsa Botan] had called me. She asked me: “Didn’t you come from Botan?”. I said yes. And she said: “I’m glad and the comrades wrote in your note that you were a bölük [troop] commander there and because you’ve already worked at that level we’re making you a front section commander here. You will become the front commander together with Heval Gelhat and you will lead the front section ‘Kaniya Kurdan.” I asked where that was, she told me with Heval Gelhat, on the ‘Şêxî’ side. I said: “Good, that fits.” And so we set off. A car came and brought us weapons and ammunition belts, but there were no clothes, so I continued to wear my civilian clothes and a bag with a few things. That’s how Heval Gelhat greeted me and he just said to me, Hevala Sorxwîn, defend yourself for three days. If you don’t fall Şehîd in these three days, then you will have learnt the tactics and the mission here and know how we have to move, how the enemy attacks and so on. And once you’ve understood that, you won’t fall Şehîd any more, but you only have to defend yourself well for the first three days. Heval Melsa had told me the same thing, she also said: “You have to hold out for three days, then you’ll have learnt.”

At that point, I understood what that meant in war, you are sent as a new area front commander and really you learn to become a commander there, nobody had told me that before. And I didn’t know what Daesh was doing, how they were fighting, where they were attacking from and by what means, which side they were coming from and so on. What is the method of the enemy? What is his tactical approach? How does he attack? Then, after these three days, you will determine the war, but you must not fall Şehîd in these first three days. Heval Gelhat had told me the same thing that Heval Melsa had already told me. If you know how to defend yourself for these three days, then you will get to know the area, get to know the situation and the war and you will know where the enemy is and where we are. And so you go and you will fight. Everyone just told me that: The first three days are important to understand the situation and everything, then you learn the rest by yourself. I said fine and left.

The Şêxî-Side

So I came to ‘Kaniya Kurdan’, the Şêxî-Side. It was around three o’clock. There was a small house made of mud bricks where Heval Gelhat was staying and received me. He said to me, ‘This is where you will learn about the war.” Heval Gelhat said: “We are now going to do some initial planning on our feet, standing still.” They showed me through a hole in the wall where our forces are and a canal that was previously ours but has now been taken by the enemy. Then they showed me the different houses, who had taken which house and where, and that all the houses in front of us in a row were the front we had taken. We were only a stone’s throw away from the Turkish border. There were a few houses that lay between us and them, we would clear them today and take them back. There were a few older people from the community in the house, fathers, they helped out where they could. Otherwise they were all young friends, a driver who kept driving to the border behind us to get things. And so we stood in front of this hole for a while and talked, it was towards evening, about 6 pm. So now I was a front section commander.

Thats just the ‘Lolo’ – Heval Çekdar

A boy called ‘Çekdar’ came to me, he was maybe 16 or 17 years old. He arrived on a motorbike, he was slim and tall and shouted: “Come Heval, Come” with his young voice. I immediately took him into my heart. And he shouted and said: “There’s a wounded friend lying on the ground, but he’s a bit fat and so I can’t lift him up on my own” He needed help from another comrade so that it would be possible to pick him up together. A sniper was still in position and firing a lot. We could hear the sound of the shots. I turned round to see who could go with him. Before Heval Gelhat had told me that the older fathers were in a group with the boys from the society to rescue the wounded from the field of fire. I wanted to send two of them to bring the friends back with the motorbike. But when I turned around, I saw that none of them were left. It was just me and Heval Gelhat. I asked Heval Gelhat: “So where has your group gone now?” He just laughed: “They ran away. Heval Sorxwîn, this is just the ‘Lolo’, the ‘Lêlê’ is still to come¹. What do you expect? There’s a sniper lying in his position, who’s going to run and get the wounded? They are normal people, not fighters. As long as the wounded have not been rescued, the population does not go to the front, but they receive the wounded from us here.”

I didn’t understood. How can it be that this is the only group in here. Now this young friend came on his motorbike and asked for help, how is he supposed to get there and back? How can that be? Someone had to go with him. He also turned around and it was clear that there was no one else and he said to me: “Now you’re getting to know the war, Lêlê is still to come and you’ll experience many more situations like this.” But when you see this with your own eyes for the first time, you ask yourself, where the spirit of the Hevaltî is. There are so many examples in the history of the movement where the comrades sacrifice themselves for their friends and ten comrades fall to save one Şehîd.

Rescuing the wounded – Heval Welat

My first approach was that I said to Heval Çekdar: “Come, I’ll come with you, take me on your motorbike, because I’m now the person in charge of the front section.” I asked Heval Gelhat for the Friend Welat Zêr. He was a comrade whose whole family is in our organisation. So I asked Heval Gelhat to send him with me and we’ll go to the front to the wounded man. He accepted and I asked Heval Welat, if he knows the area here. So he could take me there and we go and rescue the wounded man together. He said: “Yes, Heval Sorxwîn, I know this area well”. So we went. I took my weapon and Heval Çekdar zigzagged us to the wounded man on his motorbike. It was towards evening, bad conditions for the sniper. We arrived at a wall where the wounded friend was, and we left the motorbike behind the wall. I saw that he really was a heavy friend. The enemy was shouting his ‘Allah û aqbar’ and was targeting a rocket launcher directly at us. Everything around us was full of sand dust. I hid behind the wall and Heval Welat was right behind me.

I had prepared two magazines for my weapon, so when the bullet hit I fired a shower of ammunition towards the enemy. When my magazine got empty, I replaced it with the second one and heard the Daesh fighter shouting ‘Ezîr, Allah û aqbar’ at me. I emptied the second magazine, then our battle stopped for a while. When it became more quiet, I turned around and asked for Heval Welat. My attention was always focused on the crater in the ground from the rocket, but I realised that Heval Welat wasn’t there. I was so afraid that he might have been hit. My eyes went black, all I could see was that there was no wounded friend or any comrade anyone. I had moved away from Heval Welat when I fired the hail of bullets. I left our place behind the wall where our motorbike was and found the wounded comrade. He was shot once and I put my hand on him, but we were still being shot at. I had two hand grenades with me. I unlocked one and threw it in the direction where the ‘allah û aqbar’ came from.

Then we heard shouting and various noises and the shelling stopped for a bit. I moved forward to the wounded comrade and tried to pick him up. No chance to lift him even a little. I asked him to pull himself together just a bit so I could lift him onto Heval Çekdar’s back. The enemy was right in front of us. When he heard that, he tried to help me and so I lifted him up and we placed him on the motorbike and Heval Çekdar’s back.

Heval Çekdar was very young as I said. The wounded friend was perhaps two or three times as wide as him, but Heval Çekdar fastened a scarf under his shoulders and then tied it around his stomach. So we lifted him onto the motorbike to get him out quickly. His legs still hung off when the comrade zigzagged him back at high speed. I shouted towards him, but he didn’t hear anything and drove off and brought the wounded friend to safety. Till today, this image is stuck in my head, I can’t get it out of my mind. But what happened to the comrade after that, I don’t know.

In the middle of the enemy – Şehîd Mîran

I don’t know exactly what happened, but I heard noises directly behind the wall next to me. They were human voices, they could have belonged to Daesh or our comrades. I tried to assess the situation. I didn’t have much ammunition left and I didn’t know my way around here. It was already getting dark, it was evening and I didn’t know where to go. So I tried to listen to the voices, sneaked up quietly and stopped at the door of the house. I waited next to the door and realised that they were Kurdish voices. They were saying to each other ‘get up’. So I shouted ‘Heval’ once very load and a young voice came back: “Huh, Heval?”. So I entered the house and saw there were nine comrades inside.

Among these nine friends were three from my group that I had brought with me from Botan. With them was Heval Mîran, a friend from the youth group, he was from Bakûr and had spent six years in Turkish prison. They were the young comrades who crossed the border with me last night. Heval Cudî was also among them and he told us that Heval Mîran had climbed onto the roof of the house and was injured there and everyone was smeared with his blood. He didn’t know whether Heval Mîran was still on the roof or whether he had fallen Şehîd. All of them were injured.

They told me Heval Mîran had climbed onto the roof early in the morning as soon as it dawned, exactly the way he had learnt in the mountains. He wanted to get an overview of our surroundings. And so he was on the roof and had lifted his head up a bit to see, but the sniper was already in position and had shot at him. As you know, the Kobanê war was mainly a sniper war. Heval Mîran got shot directly in the head and fell Şehîd. The comrades around him were all new fighters. I had brought them here, they didn’t know the war here yet. Of course they saw education before, but they had never been in such a difficult war situation. What they knew were different weapon impacts, the sounds of war and warplane attacks. But this one-by-one war combat with the enemy was new. It shocked them.

We heard more voices. It was a whole Daesh-group and they were coming just from outside the wall. So I sneaked to the window, peeked outside and saw them right outside our door with a red taxi. I wondered who they were. “Isn’t that Daesh?” They didn’t know. “How is it possible that you don’t know? You are in the middle of the territory of the enemy and you are not moving?” They all had been frozen in their position as if they were already dead.

“So then go to Mohammed” – Getting injured

I decided to take the Grenade launcher and fire it into their group. But when I moved towards the window, they immediately realized and attacked us with heavy machine guns (BKC). They shot with two of them and broke the window. Our young comrades all threw themselves to the ground, as they learned it in the mountains, thinking that they were safe, because they were hiding behind sandbags. But besides putting their heads down, they didn’t defend themselves at all. So I went to the window to fire at the Daesh fighters. But I hadn’t taken any precautions and was hit by shrapnel flying through the air. I was knocked to the ground by a stone and blood was pouring out of my eye. I felt dizzy and went down. It was already dark, I lied on the ground and heard the friends saying: “Oh, it got her too, she also died”. They didn’t dare to move and just saw me fall to the ground. Nobody moved, but the shouts and voices from outside got louder and louder.

I tried to clean my eyes with my hand, but blood is salty when it gets into the eyes and it burned terribly. I got myself together and again went to the window where I wanted to fire a grenade. But in a confined space the pressure of the grenade launcher is multiplied. The back-tube of the weapon touched already the wall behind me, that was far too dangerous to fire. So I turned a bit to change my position and aimed the red car in front of the house.

I launched the grenade into their crowd, which made a huge noise and I was deafened for a while. So I couldn’t hear what was going on around me, but I continued shooting everything I had…

…to be continued…

The next part will be published on 6th of March. The third part and the full version on 8th of March.