My experience as an Internationalist in YPJ
I joined YPJ in 2019. I deliberately wanted to join the military side of this revolution because I saw myself as a more practically talented person. At home I had taken part in actions against militarization and arms exports and had harbored helpless anger and contempt against the murder machines of the states (including those who work within them- from paid murderers, strategists of destruction, to mechanical engineers and thoughtless young people who lease years of their lives without understanding to whom, simply happy with the high wage they earn, to those who prepare food to keep everyone going). The anger and contempt have remained, the helplessness has not. I had already understood in Europe that the war in and around Rojava is an existential one, aimed at the complete eradication of any revolutionary Kurdish identity and hope for a libertarian alternative to the state, for a free life. With no regard to the many civilian lives it costs. I wanted to get to know this revolution, preferably from the inside.
My motivation was high, but my ideas – especially about the military – were naive. I was aware that these people, who were fighting against a state army with NATO backing and various mercenary troops, did not have an abundance of resources and time, and I would not have been surprised if a decrepit weapon had been pressed into my hands and the rough direction to the front described in gestures. When I arrived the reality was quite different. Initially, I was placed with families who welcomed me very warmly and treated me like one of their children, while I felt like a stranded fish, neither knowing the language nor the culture.
Taking the first steps
They calmly overlooked my mistakes and ignorance and were happy about every word I learned. At my first military point -the YPJ-International base- my first commander tried to teach me the basics of everything. Not just about all kinds of weapons we had around, also about the language, about life in Rojava, about the ideology of the revolution and its history. She wanted to prepare me for what was to come, and in between she told me about her own experiences. She told me about her childhood in my homeland, where she had felt like a stranger, about the mountains of Kurdistan, about the wars she had fought and the people she had met along the way.
There were funny stories and sad stories, stories about the endless suffering that people had experienced under Daesh (IS) and about the endless strength and hope that people can carry, stories that made me long for places I had never seen before. During this time Turkey attacked Serekanie and Girespi and after two months I joined a regular YPJ formation and then my first Tabur (unit of about 20-30 comrades). My language was still poor and awkward, and I often felt like a child who needed help with even the simplest tasks and had only a handful of words. My comrades greeted me with friendly, simple friendship and interest, quickly taking me along, pulling me along, sometimes carrying me and dragging me along. Wherever I went, there was at least one friend who understood what I was trying to say and translated when necessary. This limping Kurdish to fluent Kurdish translation enabled me to get to know the other friends and understand what they were discussing.
But even without the translation, we always found ways to talk – even about abstract topics- laugh together, settle differences of opinion and talk about our ideas and the worlds we come from. In the beginning we often talked with hands and feet, only made possible by the immense patience of my comrades.
Being in education
Slowly I took tiny steps and began to walk by myself, I got to know the different processes and comrades, I understood what was important and what needed to be done. After a few weeks, I was sent to my first military training, eight months in the open air, the first three months exclusively ideological education (What values do we defend? What is free life? How can we live properly? What is the role of women in society? What is the reality of societies in the so-called Middle East? What are our ideas for the revolution? Whose footsteps are we following? Many topics to which the answers change and develop with the people and throughout the revolution). The nature around us was breathtakingly beautiful. I was fascinated by the animals and plants, many of which were unknown to me, and I couldn’t see enough of the world around us.
Lessons were held in a a school that we had built out of reeds, the walls were decorated with Sehid (martyrs) pictures whose battle we wanted to continue. I didn’t understand the lessons well at the beginning and I only understood the practical lessons, because my comrades translated them into easy Kurdish for me. Gradually, I was able to participate more and more in the lessons. We kept night watch on hills of light-colored stone that glowed magically in the moonlight under millions of stars and during these hours it often seemed to me as if time had ceased to exist. There was a river near us from which we drank throughout our education, in whose clear, deep and from afar turquoise water we washed our faces every morning, in whose shallows we bathed and on whose rocks we dried ourselves. We did an hour of sport every morning, watching the colors of the day creep into the world. We helped each other in sports, pulled our friends who couldn’t go on up and when a few months had passed, we could all run for an hour without a break.
Becoming one force
I saw how much our common strength developed, became a force and it filled me with massive pride. Helping each other was a normality that ran through all aspects of life and without which we would not have been able to work, live and learn the way we did. We learned to move together, in grasslands, on rocky plains, between slopes and through wooded land and undergrowth, on trails, roads of dust and no roads at all. We learned to store our supplies properly and to ration them, to wash our hair with only a small teapot full of water and to get through a scorching hot day with just a one-liter bottle of water. Each friend had at least one book in her backpack, small volumes of poetry, biographies and diaries, political analysis, histories and history books, which, not all but many, read in the hours they stole from their sleep. There was little sleep and we also learned to be alert despite our tiredness, to never forget the big picture.
A comrade in my Tim (smallest unit of about 3-5 friends) had lost almost all her tabur comrades in the war. When she tried to carry a wounded friend to safety, he fell Sehid on her back. She repeatedly told me about this situation, the hours before and after, always focusing on a different detail. I think I learned Kurdish most by listening to her without even realizing it. She told me so much and so vividly about the comrades from her tabur that at the end of the education I had the feeling that they had also taken part in our education without ever having seen any of their faces. The same comrade had only gone to school for four years as a child, with interruptions, and then had to run the household and look after her siblings, taking the place of her sick mother.
Her math skills were poor and often insufficient for the lessons, but she had learned or relearned to read and write in three languages (Kurdish, Turkish and Arabic) in the movement. So we studied math in the evenings, sometimes just the two of us, usually with others and always absolutely exhausted from the day. The friend had been blind for eight months after being wounded herself and had been told that she would definitely not be able to see again. Because she had repeatedly insisted on being released to work again when she began to recognize shadows and light in general, she was sent to a quiet job with a certificate forbidding her to do any physical work.
She burned the certificate and was perhaps the most athletic between us. She drew numbers in her notebook night after night with the same discipline and ambition and grasped them very quickly, even understanding fractions and calculating angles after a very short time. While collecting wood, washing clothes, digging, running, during the breaks, she and the others told me about the revolution and its beginnings, about their society and culture, about home and about the movement itself. The realities from which we all came to education were very different, just as colorful as the different comrades. The military part was easy for me and I enjoyed it, as did most of the others. We quickly developed skills in practical training. During this time, however, I understood that it is primarily about building a free life, free thinking and feeling and free relationships, as well as the ability to make decisions and implement them together. In addition, one of the most important tasks in this revolution is to build knowledge in the Kurdish language, which has been banned throughout history, and to do this with free consciousness.
The power of Learning
Knowledge is power, and the powerful have kept the Kurdish people away from education and knowledge, stigmatizing their language and culture in order to make them forget their own identity. This practice is called “white genocide” and, just like physical annihilation, leads to the people who have forgotten themselves and their history ceasing to exist as such. The comrades were all prepared to give their lives to protect their people and their land. For me as a European, that was strange at first, then impressive. In Europe, we have many difficulties that lead to work stopping because we are unable to overcome our own comforts where it is necessary or to build up the willingness to honestly change where it stops being fun for us personally. Reber APO (Abdullah Öcalan) has assessed that societies in the “West” are too focused on the individual and negate the community. In the “East”, on the other hand, societies are too community-oriented without being able to give meaning to the individual. The comrades here are almost all prepared to put personal needs aside at all times, to do what is necessary, even if it is not convenient or easy for them.
At the same time, many of them can hardly write in their own daily spoken language and automatically fall into Turkish or Arabic when they talk about technical topics, e.g. use technical terms or describe technical contexts that they have learned in state schools. There are doctors, lawyers and comrades in the movement who are educated in various professions at a high academic level, but the development of academic knowledge, literature, education, media, technical training and historiography in Kurdish in a systematic way is only a few decades old and still requires a lot of effort. All comrades in the movement are continuously being educated, educate themselves- this is a hopeful start. Towards the end of my education, I realized more and more that I had to bring in my previous academic knowledge (which I gained, because I was lucky) rather than what we had learned in education, even though I felt that was exactly what I was good at. At the end of my education, I proposed to be sent into practical works, but I was open to almost all kinds of revolutionary work.
It was hard to say goodbye to the comrades from the education. Most of them could hardly wait to be assigned to their new places and tasks. For me on the other hand the uncertainty where I’d go next was still too intangible for me not to be sad that we would all be leaving each other. My eventual work assignment ended up being very different to what I had expected and I found it hard to convince myself that I was capable to do it at all. Everyday life was different to education and it took me some time to find my feet again. I missed my comrades for a long time. I hadn’t been in my new Tim for long when I had an accident and was injured. The comrades had just gotten to know me, but they looked after me in such a loving way that I was deeply impressed. They taught me a lot about life and its meaning during this time and I learned about the strength and beauty of their struggle and friendship. Because of the injury, I couldn’t stay in the job I was originally meant to do and am now in a job that is all about building knowledge again. There is a sentence from Reber APO that the comrades often quote: “It is more difficult to live properly than to fight in a war”. That’s what it’s about above all else – living right, living free, whether in the social or military sphere makes no difference. A friend once told me “it’s hard to build a free life when people are dead, physically destroyed” sometimes things are as true as they are simple. The Kurdish people, the Kurdish movement has made an advance in the search for free life and the world is (still slowly) following suit.
Revolutionary greetings