About the Author Azad Cudi is a 35-year-old British national from a Kurdish background. Based in London and Brussels, Azad grew up in eastern Kurdistan, where he was conscripted into the army and escaped to the UK. Aged 19, he was granted asylum and citizenship, learnt English and began working as a journalist for the Kurdish diaspora media. In 2011, Azad was working for a television station in Stockholm when the Syrian civil war broke out and the Kurds established their autonomous enclave. Azad's response was to fly out to Syria and work as a social worker, but as the civil war expanded he became a fighter in the volunteer army, the YPG. Read more Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. When they attacked Kobani in the autumn of 2014, ISIS sent twelve thousand jihadis against our two and a half thousand men and women. They had artillery, mortars, tanks and heavy machine guns, mobile battle kitchens and surgeries, even social media managers and investment specialists to manage their trade in pillaged oil and artefacts. We lacked the most basic equipment, right down to binoculars and radios, ate whatever we found in the kitchens of abandoned houses and armed ourselves with forty-year-old Kalashnikovs and a few boxes of ammunition. If surviving these odds was already a figurative long shot, our meagre tools ensured it would also require literal ones. Sniping – killing the invaders one by one – was one of the few tactics available to us. I have often been asked how many we killed. I always refused to answer. Only a weak man would measure himself in kills. Only a fool would try to describe all the hate, loss, sacrifice and love in war with a number. If only to set the matter aside, let me say at the outset that in eight months, our snipers decimated them. Herdem killed 500, Hayri 350 and me 250, making more than a thousand between us. My task in these pages is to explain how we accumulated these terrible numbers in a way that you might understand us. Read more
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