Isis has gone . . . but so has his city
Kurdish fighters and allied airstrikes have driven out the jihadists after a 134-day battle. But only rubble remains, Hala Jaber writes.
ANGRY bewildered, Hussein Moslem stares at the carpet of rubble and concrete slabs that was once his neighbourhood in the Syrian city of Kobani, near the Turkish border.
His home used to be somewhere over there, he says. Or was it over there? The 50-year-old carpenter and bricklayer turned fighter cannot tell. ‘‘This is my neighbourhood and I don’t recognise it. I can’t find my home where I lived for 20 years,’’ he says. He turns around in circles, unable to comprehend the destruction.
Kalashnikov in hand, Hussein climbs over bricks, concrete and twisted metal, repeating to himself: ‘‘Islam does not do this.’’
Suddenly he stops, points at a pile of rubble and says quietly: ‘‘This is my house.’’ The clue, he says, is the school on the corner of the road which, although badly damaged, is still standing.
Hussein’s flattened neighbourhood is like much of Kobani, from which the forces of Isis, also known as Islamic State, were finally driven last week after four months of fierce fighting with Kurdish forces, and allied airstrikes that have razed the city.
But he says he will never leave Kobani, which became a symbol of resistance to the onward march of the militants from the group. ‘‘I shall die in and for Kobani and I hope all five sons of mine die here too,’’ he said.
It took nearly three days of negotiations with the Turkish authorities to cross the few hundred yards from the Turkish border post of Mursitpinar into this city where Isis admitted defeat and pulled out.
They let in me and the photographer Mathias Depardon on Friday, in one large group and only after we signed a declaration that we did so at our own risk. We were given four hours in Kobani before the gates back into Turkey would be closed. Our passports and press cards remained behind with the authorities.
We stepped through the metal gate into Kobani on a bitterly cold, drizzly day and were met by a few Kurdish fighters and local journalists. Walking into the city, the signs of destruction were everywhere. But it was the stillness that was the most shocking.
In alleyways that once housed women’s clothes shops, shutters were blown out and piled in the middle of the road. Others hung off the doors. Mannequins were tossed into surreal positions across the streets and shop floors. Jeans, and dresses were strewn everywhere.
It was only when we reached Liberty Square that the scale of the destruction became clear. The main hospital and buildings around it lay in ruins, destroyed by three Isis suicide car bombs on November 29. The hospital had to be moved into the basement of an office building.
Block after block and street after street were strewn with
and
A man walks in a street with abandoned vehicles and damaged buildings in the northern Syrian town of Kobani. Sheets meant to hide residents from snipers’ sights still hang over streets and the shattered buildings and cratered roads suggest those who fled will face a difficult return.
Hussein Moslem rubble and concrete, garbage and shattered blankets and mattresses.
Some blankets and sheets had been strung between buildings by fighters to protect them from sniper fire as they moved between buildings.
Mopeds, battered vehicles and pick-up trucks drove past carrying Kurdish fighters armed with Kalashnikovs and assault rifles. They greeted us and gave the victory sign. Groups huddled around small drums containing wood fires.
The sickening stench of death rose from piles of rubble, and from the rotting bodies of bearded Isis fighters still lying in the street.
The Kurdish fighters said many bodies had been cleared and buried within the first 48 hours metal, glass, after the city was liberated. The winter cold helped to slow the decomposition and reduce the risk of disease.
After walking for about an hour we met Hussein at a police base in Kobani. He offered to be our guide to the ghost city.
A Syrian Kurd, Hussein speaks fluent Arabic. ‘‘This is what is left of our city,’’ he said repeatedly as we took in the devastation. He pointed out buildings where he had done the carpentry or brickwork.
‘‘Most Kurds work as labourers to buy a car and build their homes. ‘‘Now these people claiming to be Muslims came and destroyed everything. All our years of hard labour taken away in what seems like a split second.’’
When Isis stormed into Kobani last September, they came in large numbers and with heavy weaponry, including the tanks they had taken as spoils of war from conquests in Iraq.
The fighters with the Kurdish People’s Protection Unit (YPG) in Kobani had little more than assault rifles and Kalashnikovs.
It took Isis just five days to take Kobani and the hills overlooking the city. Like thousands of others, Hussein sent his wife and children to Turkey.
‘‘We saw what they had done to the Yazidi women and we were not prepared to have our women and girls taken as sex slaves by Isis,’’ he said.
Nearly 200,000 residents fled across the border, while their men joined forces to retake their city.
‘Most Kurds work as labourers to buy a car and build their homes. ‘‘Now these people claiming to be Muslims came and destroyed everything. All our years of hard labour taken away in what seems like a split second.’
Since then, Hussein said, he had been fighting largely along the city’s northern front.
Last Monday Isis finally gave up, after thousands of bombs had been dropped by the allies over a period of nearly four months. The 134-day battle for Kobani culminated with a 17-hour air assault that had begun the previous day.
The blitz came after YPG fighters, supported by the peshmerga of President Masoud Barzani’s Kurdish regional government took the strategic hill of Mishtenur, changing the course of the battle.
Mishtenur is the highest point in Kobani, overlooking the town and southern supply routes used by Isis to ferry men and weapons from Raqqa in Syria, which they claim is their capital.
Retaking the hill allowed the Kurdish fighters to push further east and west of the town.
As the coalition intensified the aerial bombardment, Isis was driven out of Kobani. To add to Isis’s humiliation, many of the Kurdish fighters were women.
One, Imarat Kobani, 25, has spent four months fighting Isis. During this time she killed many, often coming face to face with them. ‘‘We are mightier than them because we are right and we fight for our own country, men, women and children, while they fought for ‘martyrdom’ and their so-called virgins,’’ she said.
Many of the Isis fighters were foreigners who had travelled from countries including Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, she said.
Despite initial denials, Isis eventually acknowledged it was repulsed from Kobani after heavy losses and the destruction of most of its buildings by coalition forces.
Observers said the militants lost about 1200 fighters in the battle for the city. American officials have said US-led airstrikes have killed 6000 militants since the air war started in August.
An Isis spokesman said: ‘‘They flattened the land with their rockets, so we were forced to retreat . . . We stayed in garrisoned positions inside more than 70 per cent of Ayn al-Islam [Kobani] but the aircraft did not leave any buildings and destroyed everything.’’
The jihadist warned, however, that Isis would ‘‘return’’ to the city.
Thousands of people flocked to Suruc, on the Turkish-Syrian border, to celebrate the victory that some western analysts have described as ‘‘the Kurds’ Stalingrad’’.
But success came at a high cost. After 134 days of fighting Kobani is uninhabitable. There is no heating, water, electricity, shops or homes. Nor does the victory in Kobani – and another in the eastern Iraqi province of Diyala – mean the war is won.
Perhaps because of the length of the siege, Kobani, with an area of just over two square miles, assumed a symbolic significance that far outweighed its strategic importance.
Isis lost many fighters in Kobani but still controls nearly 350 villages around the city and huge swathes of territory across Syria and Iraq, including Raqqa and Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, which was taken by Isis last June.
Patrick Skinner, an analyst with the Soufan Group intelligence consultancy, said: ‘‘The airstrikes were devastating . . . but it took 10,000 US Marines to clear Fallujah [10 years ago], which is a fraction of the size of Mosul.’’
As Isis fighters were being repelled from Kobani, the group was striking elsewhere and announcing itself in other countries.
In Iraq, nine people died in bomb attacks in and around Baghdad and a senior Kurdish commander was killed during clashes near the oil-rich city of Kirkuk last week. It followed attacks last week by Isis loyalists on military installations in Sinai, Egypt, that killed dozens, and on a hotel in Tripoli, in which two westerners died.
Back in Kobani, our four hours were nearly over and Hussein walked us back to the gate. Would he now go and join his wife and children in Turkey?
‘‘Certainly not,’’ he said. ‘‘Kobani may be free from those animals, but our war with them is not over yet. There are more villages to liberate and more scum to kill until we drive them out.’’
The New York Times reported, citing his son, Dale.
The cause was complications of liver and bone cancer.
An Austrian-born research chemist, Djerassi crossed academic disciplines to study how the birth-control pill he helped create influenced women’s health, gender equality and global population.
‘‘By separating the coital act from contraception, the pill started one of the most monumental movements in recent times, the gradual divorce of sex from reproduction,’’ he wrote in This Man’s Pill: Reflections on the 50th Birthday of the Pill (2001), the last of three autobiographies.