Father’s pride in daughter killed fighting for Kurds
After 27-year-old Anna Campbell’s death fighting in Syria, Eleanor Steafel and Martin Evans ask her family what compelled her to go
The father of a British woman killed fighting for the all-female Kurdish YPJ unit has spoken of his immense pride in her actions, saying she always stood up to defend the defenceless. Anna Campbell, 27, from Lewes, East Sussex, was killed last week in a Turkish air strike in northern Syria. Her father, Dirk, said: “She was led by her conscience in almost everything. She had a very highly developed sense of justice.”
Anna Campbell was filled with a stronger sense of injustice than most 27-year-olds. For the majority, that burning desire to right every wrong is left behind in adolescence. But for Anna, the need to put an end to suffering and stand up to iniquity was in her bones. “It seems a small thing, but I remember when she was 11, she protected a bumblebee from being tormented by other kids at school,” says her father Dirk. “She did it with such strength of will that they ridiculed her. But she didn’t care. She was absolutely single-minded when it came to what she believed in.”
At 11, Anna already understood that her role in life would be to defend the vulnerable. Which is why last summer, having split up with her partner, she left her flat in Bristol and the plumbing job she loved, and headed to Syria, to join a female militia group fighting in the besieged country’s Kurdish north.
It’s also why, on Sunday afternoon, Anna’s father found himself answering the door of his East Sussex home to her friend, who came bearing the news he had dreaded.
“She said she was here to talk about Anna, and I knew right away,” he says. Ten months after Anna left, she had been killed in a Turkish air strike.
It had begun as a passion project, the latest in a long line of issues that troubled her young mind. As a student, a friend recalls, she would regularly latch on to a campaign or a cause and make it her entire raison d’être. “She wanted to create a better world,” her father says. “She would do everything in her power to do that. [What has happened] is shocking, but, in a way, it’s not surprising.
“She was always very empathetic with animals, vulnerable creatures and vulnerable people. I remember her causing trouble in student occupations. She was led by her conscience in almost everything.”
A good student, Anna had studied English and French at Sheffield University – but, says Mr Campbell, 67, his daughter was always “more of a doer”.
“She wanted to be out, doing things. She moved to Bristol and did a blacksmithing course and a plumbing course, and then qualified as a plumber. In all that time, she was absorbing a lot of information about the alternative political scene. She spent a lot of time in the Calais Jungle, and at the Dale Farm site. She got involved in a lot.”
As she learnt more about what was happening in Syria, Anna became increasingly restless, determined to go out and help a Kurdish militia known as the YPJ, the female arm of the Rojava Revolution. She began training to go to Syria, planning to join the women of Deir ez-zur, to the east of the country, where the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) continued to hold the last of their territory. She said she wanted to “participate in the revolution of women”, and “join the weaponised fight against the forces of fascism”.
That this “popular, bookish, beautiful” girl from Lewes – whose first loves at her independent girls school in Brighton had been nature and animals – had decided to put herself in the path of the most unimaginable danger would be unthinkable to most families. But for Mr Campbell, the news that his second daughter was going to travel to Syria, to defend one of the most volatile stretches of land in the Middle
‘I could be killed – but there’s nothing I can do to reassure you about that’
East, was almost expected. Mr Campbell – a folk musician and composer, whose work has featured in films such as Harry Potter and the
Goblet of Fire – says he knew, of course, that his daughter would be in terrible danger in Syria, but he also knew there was “no stopping her”.
“Obviously, I was worried for her, we all were,” he says, recalling the conversations they had in the lead up to her leaving, as he sits in the kitchen of his home in Lewes. “I told her she would be in terrible danger, but she was insistent. It was something she desperately wanted to do.
“Anna was very brave, she was very beautiful and she was really idealistic. She went there knowing what might happen to her. When she told me I was alarmed because I knew she was likely to face lethal fire there, if not from Islamic State then from the Turks and Syrian Army. I told her that. I said: ‘You could be killed’, and she said: ‘I know. There’s nothing I can do to reassure you about that.’
“I had to let her do what she wanted. I couldn’t force her not to go. She was a grown woman, she could make her own decisions in life.”
All Mr Campbell, who lost his wife to breast cancer five years ago, could do was to hope against hope that she would be lucky, that she would fulfil her burning desire to join a band of women whose lives were worlds away from her own, and that, one day, she would return home safe.
“I was with her all the way,” he says. But in January, Turkish forces began a major offensive against the Kurds along the northern Syrian border, prompting many Kurdish fighters to travel north to Afrin, to help defend the border. Despite the protestations of her commanders, and the concerns of her family, Anna was adamant that she should be among them. In a video posted on social media two weeks ago, before she left for Afrin, where she was killed last Thursday, Anna – the eighth Briton to have been killed in Syria while working with Kurdish forces – said: “The attacks of the Turkish state against the revolution, the Kurdish people and the people of Kurdistan are very shocking. I am happy to join my friends to defend ourselves and our revolution against the enemy.”
Anna’s sisters, Sophia, the eldest, and Rose, the youngest of the three, weep as their father talks about Anna’s unbreakable spirit, how he regrets not doing more to talk her out of going.
“I feel I should have done more to persuade her to come back, but she was completely adamant,” he says. “But I also knew that she would never have forgiven me if I had actively prevented her from doing so.”
Mr Campbell last spoke to Anna two months ago. “She said everything was fine, and gave the impression she was not doing much fighting, but I think this was to stop me worrying,” he recalls. “She wanted to go to Afrin, even though it was a hellhole. She did everything possible to go.”
Both Sophia and Rose were deeply worried about their sister’s plans to go to Syria. Understandably, they are too distraught and shocked to speak in any great detail, only to say they remember the last few times they saw her. “Anna was exercising an hour a day, every day, before she went to Syria, to get fit,” Sophia recalls. “[We] were all concerned about her going, but it was the most important thing in her life for her to do.” Tragically, this is a family who, in many ways, are still coping with another tragedy – the death of their mother, Adrienne, in 2012.
Reading tributes to Adrienne – a committed activist and ecologist – after her death in 2012, it’s clear Anna shared something of her mother’s fighting spirit. In her eulogy, a family friend spoke of how Adrienne had desired her children to “find their own way”.
“I know when the sadness has diminished, Sophia, Anna, Rose and Adam will go out into their lives braver, more conscious, wiser human beings, having learnt about life and death from their courageous mum.”
Adrienne was an avid campaigner, co-founding an experimental school in Lewes, and once being arrested at a protest against tax evasion. Like her daughter, she loved nature and was a keen beekeeper – and perhaps the inspiration for Anna to take care of that vulnerable bee 15 years ago.
The Campbells was a household where politics was constantly discussed, where every member of the family was driven by a desire to make a difference, and Anna was no exception. “[Anna] was determined to live in a way that made a difference to the world, and she was determined to act on that and do whatever it took,” Mr Campbell says.
“I am extremely proud of her and always will be. She did what very few people are capable of doing, which is putting her own life on the line for a cause that she thought was nonnegotiable.”