What drove private schoolgirl Anna to become first British woman to die fighting in Syria?
ANNA Campbell always had a rebellious streak – fuelled perhaps by youthful idealism and a desire to do good in the world. Back in 2011, she took part in the infamous ‘Battle of Dale Farm’ to resist the mass eviction of Europe’s largest (illegal) traveller site at Crays Hill, Essex.
She also worked for No Borders – the anarchist group opposed to controlled migration – at the ‘Jungle’ encampment in Calais. Hunt saboteur was another entry on her CV.
‘One of us’ is how a contemporary from the Brighton Anti-fascists group described her.
Anna, 26, would not be the first privately educated young woman to follow such a path; she was educated at £10,000-a year St Mary’s Hall, a prestigious independent girls’ school in Brighton which closed a few years ago, before going on to study at Sheffield University. Until recently, she was working as a trained plumber in Bristol.
Who, though, could have possibly pre- dicted where Anna Campbell’s youthful idealism would lead her? Friends might not even immediately recognise her from her most recent photograph.
Anna is dressed in military fatigues, her blonde hair dyed jet black, next to her nom de
guerre Helin Qerecox and the words ‘ Sehid namirin’, which, loosely, means ‘martyrs never die’ in Kurdish.
For the past ten months, Anna had been a member of an allfemale Kurdish militia group fighting Islamic State in Syria. Earlier this year she persuaded her commanders to send her to the besieged city of Afrin, a Kurdish enclave in north- western Syria, where Turkey has launched a ground and air offensive against Kurdish forces.
It was virtually a suicide mission. The defence of Afrin against the Turks was, by all accounts a hopeless cause. Anna Campbell knew this – but still she went.
On Thursday the inevitable happened; Anna was killed in a Turkish airstrike.
She became the first British woman to be killed fighting alongside Kurdish forces in Syria. Seven British men have also died.
Anna is believed to be one of just a few British women to have travelled to join the Kurdish female fighters. Kim Taylor from Blackburn was revealed as one of the first to join up last year.
Yesterday in an emotional interview with the Mail, Anna’s grieving father Dirk, 67, told how he had been powerless to prevent his daughter leaving the UK.
‘I told her she would be in terrible danger, that she would come under bombardment but she was insistent,’ he said. ‘It was something she desperately wanted to do and there was no stopping her.’
One of the last pictures of Anna shows her celebrating her 26th birthday with comrades from the Kurdish Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) – the all-female affiliate army of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) – before volunteering for the Afrin frontline.
SOhow did a girl from a privileged background end up in one of the most dangerous places on earth? Anna grew up in Lewes, East Sussex, the middle of three sisters.
Her father Dirk is a folk musician and renowned composer whose movie credits include scores for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, The Mummy and The Last King of Scotland. Her mother Adrienne died of breast cancer six years ago.
‘Anna was very interested in political history and that interest grew as she got older,’ recalled Mr Campbell, close to tears. ‘She was very idealistic, very wholehearted and wanted to change the world for the better.’
Initially, that led his daughter to become involved, around the time she was at Sheffield University, in causes such as Dale Farm and later with the organisation No Borders. ‘I remember Anna from Sheffield,’ said university friend Joe Oliver. ‘I remember her causing trouble – in a good way – in student occupations, cycling everywhere and selling cakes in New Roots, an organic health food shop.’
Anna’s campaigning zeal was inherited from her late mother. ‘Anna was carrying on a lot of the kind of work that Adrienne was doing,’ Mr Campbell said. ‘She was a credit to her mum.’
Tellingly, perhaps, Anna’s family also have a number of Kurdish friends, including one who was a member of the PKK, an organisation which is fighting for an independent Kurdish state.
Turkey views both the YPG and the PKK not as freedom fighters but terrorist organisations; the enmity between Turks and Kurds goes back generations.
It was in May last year that Anna told her father of her plans to journey to northern Syria.
‘I told her “You could be killed”, and she replied “I know. There’s nothing I can do to reassure you about that”,’ Mr Campbell said.
‘I had to let her do what she wanted to. I couldn’t force her not to go. She was a grown woman, she made her own decisions in life.’
In the weeks before Anna left for Syria, she was ‘exercising every day to get fit’, he said.
She arrived in Syria with fellow Briton Macer Gifford, a former banker, and set up camp in the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, a de facto semi-autonomous region known as Rojava, the heartland of the YPJ.
Anna completed the mandatory month- long military training course and was then sent to Deir ez-Zor, the second largest city in
eastern Syria, and Islamic State’s last major stronghold. In January many Kurdish fighters left Deir ez-Zor and travelled 250 miles to Afrin.
Mr Campbell said his daughter was urged not to go. She was told that her blonde hair would make her a target, so she dyed it black to conceal the fact she was a Westerner.
It was with this dark hair that Anna appeared in a video posted on Twitter yesterday by the YPJ in Rojava. It was filmed shortly after she arrived in Afrin.
EXPLAINING HER decision to remain in Syria to help repel the Turkish onslaught, she says: ‘I know how hard it can be in many different ways that I was not expecting. But I am really excited to go and join so many brave friends that are fighting there now.
‘And with the memory of friends that have fallen sehid [martyred] in this operation and in the whole war I will fight even stronger.’
Smiling warmly, she adds: ‘I wanted to support the revolution. I wanted to join the revolution of women that is being built up here and join the weaponised fight against the forces of fascism and the enemies of the revolution. So now I am very happy and proud to be going to Afrin.’Included in the short clip was an album of photographs of Anna armed and in YPJ uniform. The video was posted with the caption: ‘Our British comrade Helin Qerecox [Anna Campbell] has become the symbol of all women after resisting fascism in Afrin to create a free world.
‘We promise to fulfil sehid [martyr] Helin’s struggle and honour her memory in our fight for freedom.’
Mr Campbell learnt of Anna’s death on Sunday. ‘A friend of Anna’s came to the door and rang the bell and said she was here to talk about Anna and I knew right away,’ he said. Speaking at his twobedroom flat in a large Victorian mansion in lewes, he paid tribute to his ‘brave and beautiful’ daughter. Her two sisters Rose and Sophia were also present and wept as their father spoke about Anna.
‘She had a lot of friends and she was very popular with many people,’ he said.
Mr Campbell said his daughter had dedicated her life to the fight against ‘unjust power and privilege’ and ‘put herself on the line for what she believed in’.
‘Anna was very brave, she was very beautiful and was really idealistic, a dedicated idealist,’ he said.
‘She went there knowing what might happen to her.’