On a rooftop in Kobani, in the autonomous region of Rojava, October 2014 set the stage for a moment etched in memory. Azad Cudi, seen through the viewfinder of his Dragunov, tracked the movements of two fighters, an elderly man and a younger one among the ruins of the city. The question hung in the air: would the young man live or die? In later memoirs about that war, the moment would crystallize into a confession of burden and disintegration of self under impossible restraint.
“We had to suppress our emotions,” he says today, speaking by phone from England in a deep, reflective voice. “We were supposed to be mechanics. You cannot cry when someone is dead or wounded, or you might be killed yourself. We learn to show consideration to the vulnerable—elders, babies, children, the disabled—but when facing a young armed man, the logic changes. You cannot feel what society taught you to feel. He has a gun. He wants to kill you. From one perspective you may feel guilt, but you weigh the context.” The strain of that experience leaves a mark; it is impossible to escape the sense that some part of the self must be sacrificed in extreme moments.
Born into a Kurdish family in Sardasht, Iran, in 1983, Azad grew up where the borders of Iran, Iraq and Turkey converge. He belonged to a group of about 2,000 who waged a brutal, protracted battle in Kobani from September 2014 to March 2015 against Islamist forces. The casualties ran high, and estimates touched into the thousands. Journalists later framed the confrontation as a modern stalemate, some likening its intensity to the Battle of Stalingrad. “The defeat we inflicted set in motion their decline,” Azad notes in Largo Reach, a sharply observed account of those six months newly published in Spain by Captain Swing.
Stalingrad’s memory lingers as a reference point, not merely for scale but for the stubborn defense of a city under siege. The stark parallel lies in the patterns: a city under relentless pressure, snipers shaping the tempo, a population resolute in its resistance. The strategy was simple in its grit: quell the threat, push back neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, door to door—until the attackers are expelled. “If we were to die there, we would die without retreat,” the narrative recalls. Understanding what it takes to push through such overload remains a challenge; the human capacity to endure in extremis is something difficult to grasp without standing in the moment itself. Yet the determination to persist remains central to the memory.
Those acquainted with firearms know the Dragunov sniper rifle’s long arc. Designed in 1963 in the Soviet Union, it has appeared from the Vietnam War to the Syrian conflict, across Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Chechnya. It appears wherever individuals commit themselves to killing—by whatever cause. In the book, Azad recalls a quiet, intimate ritual as he shifted away from front-line duties toward administration: “He was on the verge of leaving the front and needed a moment to absorb what was happening. I cleaned my Dragunov one last time and went up to the roof with him. I rested the gun on my knee and stroked it… I respected that machine.” The act was more than maintenance; it was a moment of reverence toward a tool that carried terrible responsibility.
“My gun gave me the confidence I needed to do what had to be done. We had to defend ourselves: they attacked our land, our people, they invaded us, and we had no choice but to respond with those weapons.” The reflection turns poignant and unsettled when it notes the paradox: a weapon that protects also claims lives. There is a strange familiarity in friendship with an instrument that, at the end of the day, remains the instrument of death. The tension between respect and fear of power is palpable, and the disquiet of such dual feelings is laid bare—perhaps even inevitable in a soldier’s life. It is the kind of insight that makes the reader pause and reconsider what it means to carry a gun in moments of moral conflict.
Rojava, the name given to the Kurdish region in what became a de facto constitutional recognition during the civil conflict, is described by Azad as a model of peaceful, stable, free, and just society. She remembers herself as a feminist from the outset. Yet in practice, institutions remain fragile, buffeted by threats from neighbors, including Turkey. It helps explain why Azad feels a sting of regret that coalition forces were not able to sustain the momentum after the ISIS threat receded. The course of events makes clear that such victories are never absolute and that geopolitical interests often overshadow human stakes.
Air power and coalition support were decisive in halting ISIS advances. Without this international backing, stopping ISIS would have been far less likely. The possibility of ISIS advancing into Turkey and, from there, into Europe, would have altered the regional balance dramatically. The coalition’s unity—comprising the United States, European nations, Russia, and others—was crucial in recognizing what was at stake and mobilizing the necessary resources. Yet Azad’s narrative also underscores a sobering truth: once the ISIS leadership was eliminated, global attention shifted away, even as daily life in Kobani and the surrounding areas remained precarious. The international community’s focus, he suggests, has often rested on shifting strategic interests in the region rather than on the people who bear the consequences of those decisions.
“Four of our seventeen snipers were seriously injured, four went insane, and one, Servan, died. Eight survived,” Azad writes. War, he observes, is a form of madness that persists even when there is no longer a battle. There, on the roof with the hours passing slowly, the mind can fracture under the weight of endless vigilance. Is there a better way to test a sniper’s resolve than to keep watching through the binoculars, hour after hour? The toll is measurable not only in bodies but in the shattering of sanity and the erosion of ordinary life.
For some, the pain of war becomes so overwhelming that it reshapes every assumption about life and death. The mind may drift toward fragile ground, and the pressures of memory can push a person toward the edge. In Azad’s account, soldiers often appear to carry a stubborn, almost austere discipline—a hard-won clarity that comes from years of facing danger alone and as a team. They trust in who they are and what they can do, and this sense of conviction often carries a heavy, almost existential weight.
Towards the end, the dialogue circles back to a stark, almost intimate question: the three “rescue bullets” carried in his pocket, meant to end his own life if arrest seemed imminent. Would such a moment ever come to pass in reality? The response remains carefully distant: no, such an act did not occur, but memories of the possible end linger in the corners of the mind. The memoir closes on this tension between necessity and control, between the self-preservation instinct and the enduring, traumatic imprint of war.