On the roof of a building in Kobani, in the autonomous region of Rojava, in October 2014. Azad Cudi from the viewfinder of his Dragunov follow the movements of the two warriors Islamic Statean old man and a young manamongst the ruins of the city. Will he kill the young man? Years later, in his memoirs about that war, he would write: “I knew what I had to do. And I felt mentally disintegrated because of the burden that came with”.
“We had to suppress our emotions,” he says now on the phone, in a heavy, thoughtful voice from somewhere in England. We were supposed to be mechanics. You cannot cry because someone is dead or injured, because then you will be killed too.. We have been taught to be considerate of certain types of people, such as the elderly, babies, children, the disabled, but when you meet a young armed man, it’s not the same logic, you can’t feel what society is doing. taught you to feel. He has a gun! He has a gun and he wants to kill you. from perspective, maybe you feel guilty but if I look at the context… You cannot have such an experience without sacrificing a bit of yourself.
Born to a Kurdish family in Sardasht (Iran) in 1983, in the mountains where the borders of Iran, Iraq and Turkey meet, Azad was part of the group of 2,000 who waged an epic battle between September 2014 and March 2015. Kobani Islamists. Numbers: 12,000. Some journalists compared it to the Battle of Stalingrad. “The defeat we gave them started their downfall.”, says Azad in ‘Largo reach’, a rough account of those six months recently published in Spain by Captain Swing.
–Stalingrad took place many years ago, but I think there are many similarities: a war in a city that was finally destroyed, the importance of snipers, the resistance of the people. The dynamic was similar, actually, we got them under control first, then pushed them back neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, door to door, until we were kicked out of the city. At one point we said, If we are going to die here, we will die, but we will not step back.. It is difficult to understand: to understand what one can do in extreme situations. Sometimes I look back and think: Did we really do this? We did? It’s incomprehensible unless it’s there. Not giving up and resisting was an extreme situation.
Those familiar with firearms Knowing the long history of the Dragunov sniper rifle, It was designed in 1963 in the Soviet Union. From the Vietnam War to the Syrian War, from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Somalia to Chechnya, Dragunov has been found wherever people dedicate themselves to killing people. For whatever reason. In the book, Azad describes his weapon beautifully, describing the moment when he finally left the front to take on administrative duties: “He was finally leaving the front and needed a moment. to assimilate. I cleaned my Dragunov one last time and went up to the roof with him. I put the gun on my knee and stroked it (…) I respected that machine”.
–My gun gave me the confidence I needed. to do what it has to do. And we had no choice but to defend ourselves: they attacked our land, our people, they attacked us, they invaded us, and we had no choice but to defend ourselves with those weapons. Yes, it was a matter of defense, but you still have a gun that takes lives. This is a strange feeling: You make friends with him to the extent that he trusts you, but at the end of the day you realize that it is friendship with the devil, that dirty machine with the capacity to kill. Again, it’s a strange feeling to want something and hate it at the same time. I don’t know if that makes sense.
Rojava is the name that Syrian Kurdistan took in the Constitution that was declared ‘de facto’ in the context of the civil war. Azad called him “a an example of a peaceful, stable, free and just society”, and she remembers being a feminist from the start. In practice, however, its institutions are fragile and live under threat from neighboring countries, including Turkey. That’s why Azad regrets that the coalition was deactivated when the Islamic State was defeated.
Air support from the coalition was essential. Without this support, it would have been impossible to stop ISIS.. Had they taken Kobani, they could have easily reached Turkey and from there to Europe, and the coalition of allies supporting us understood this very well. United States of AmericaEurope, Russia, Japaneveryone understood what was at stake and they all contributed to winning this war. But when the ISIS chief was killed, the whole world forgot about us. We always have a knife to our throat and we cannot say anything from the international community because their interests with Turkey are now more important than our freedom. The international community always looks out for their interests.
“Four of our 17 snipers were seriously injured, four went insane and one of them, Servan, died. Eight of us survived,” Azad writes. War is crazy, it always has been. There, alone on the roof, to let the hours pass without movingIs there a better chance of driving the sniper crazy by always looking through the binoculars?
–The pain of what you see in war is so great that sometimes your little understanding of life and death is not enough to manage it, so in a situation like this I would be very surprised if people didn’t. lose my head People lose their minds and go crazy and go to the psychiatrist. It’s comfort and pleasure and happy living to live in the most comfortable lifestyles in Europe, so it seems normal to me to go crazy in a war. But snipers, individually and as a team, have a strong mindset, a strong spirit: they are accustomed to acting alone and have a well-equipped mind to take on challenges. They trust who they are and what they can do. In fact, they are usually people of superior power.
-Tell me: they three “rescue bullets” he carried in his pocket to kill himself before he was arrested, Have you ever come close to using them?
-Actually no, I didn’t experience that moment, but I had many memories that I was sure were in my pocket before I went into surgery. But I never thought of using them.