We translated an interview from the German Lower Class Magazine that they made on the battle for Kobane with a YPG commander.
“When I think about what I experienced now, it feels like I’m remembering a movie. I sometimes wonder if it all really happened like that”
This is certainly not the first time you have heard these words. You come across them again and again, in books with imaginary heroes or in films in which fiction and fantasy make everything seem possible. But if they are a reflection of reality, they take on a leaden, heavy meaning when you stop for a moment and think about it.
Heval Rubar came to Germany from northern Kurdistan as a young boy with his mother at the end of the 1980s. His father had previously found work here. 25 years later, Rubar’s path leads him back to Kurdistan. IS is on the advance. So, he swaps his wooden spoon for the PKM and starts to serve 7.62 mm bullets.
LowerClassMagazine: Kobanê is the symbol of resistance against IS par excellence. When the IS offensive began against the small town, which was one of the starting points of the Rojava Revolution in 2012, the whole world was suddenly reporting on the Kurdish struggle. How did you perceive the situation at the time?
Heval Rubar: At the time, I was working in a restaurant in Germany. I then saw the atrocities committed by IS on television. I saw that IS was taking over more and more cities and going to Shengal. Thousands of people were killed there and women’s heads were cut off. I saw that on the internet and it hurt me. I then thought about it and told myself that we all die at some point, but not everyone can die for something beautiful. My decision was made to go to Shengal and fight against this threat to all of humanity. The friends I told about my desire to go and fight actually wanted to send me to the mountains. Later, I was supposed to do political work in Germany. But it was clear to me that I wanted to fight. I told my boss at the time that I was taking a vacation. I spent the days I had remaining before I left in the village where my parents and I used to live. There I visited their graves in the cemetery once again. Four days later I was already in the city of Urfa. I had to wait a few days in northern Kurdistan, in Urfa, until a road to Kobanê was open. There were seven of us, two from Germany and three from France. Of these seven friends, three were killed in action and three went back to Europe. We actually only came to help and then wanted to go back.
How did you feel when you arrived in Kobanê? How can we imagine the situation there at the time?
Before we went to the front, we first saw 40 days of military training. At that point, there was no way to Shengal. The training wasn’t quite finished when the IS attack on Kobanê began. The first thing I thought to myself in Kobane was ‘Oh God, we are poor’. But the friendship I experienced there touched my heart.
First we went to the front line in the village of Şêxler. We always cleared two villages directly behind the front line so that what happened in Shengal wouldn’t happen again. I myself was a PKM gunner in a ‘Haraketli Tabur’, a mobile unit. We were always sent to wherever there was fighting. Şehîd Arîn Mîrkan was in the same unit.
Mahmud Berxwedan (Binefs) was the commander in charge in Kobanê at the time. After we withdrew, he told us that we should get some rest. At the front we had no opportunity to shave, no shower and no proper food. We washed our clothes and rested for about an hour. Our clothes were still wet when Mahmud Berxwedan rejoined us. We had to get ready quickly because IS was planning an attack after Friday prayers. As feared, there was a big attack on Friday. There really were a lot of them. They looked like ants. They ran towards us and shouted “Tekbir Allahu Ekber”. There were three of us, me, an RPG shooter and another friend. We had our mewzî, our position, on the first line. There was a distance of 50 meters between me and the mewzî, where the friend with the rocket launcher was lying. The IS wanted to advance at night. There was a boy with me who was obviously a bit scared. He said he was going to have a quick look to see where the enemy was. Then he was gone.
On that particular day, I hadn’t brought my Kalashnikov and my Rext, the vest with magazines. My friends thought I would be more agile and could run faster that way. Overall, we weren’t well equipped. Our pistols were old, we had no bullets and we had to take weapons from the enemies we killed. I only had one grenade with me that day.
I had built my mewzî from the surrounding stones. There was a small hole in the front so I could shoot from it with the PKM. The place was very good. Then IS came with Allahu Ekber and I started shooting with the PKM. I think I killed a lot of them that night. I couldn’t see much because of the darkness. Maybe I didn’t hit anyone either (laughs). When I ran out of bullets, I kept fighting with my pistol. At some point, however, a cartridge jammed. In the darkness, I could only see 6-7 meters away at most. When I looked around, I realized that two IS people were running towards me with a rocket launcher. Fortunately, their shots missed me. They then stopped firing because they wanted me alive so they could cut off my head. I then took my only grenade, pulled the pin and pressed it against my chest. But in a split second I changed my mind and threw the bomb in the direction of the voices. It was quiet after the explosion. I must have been pretty lucky. I was then told over the radio to pull back. I then ran the 500 meters to our new line, sometimes running, sometimes crawling on the ground. My arms and legs were bloody afterwards. They hadn’t managed to take our position that day.
What happened after that? The city of Kobanê was increasingly surrounded.
First of all, food arrived at 9 o’clock the next morning. Apart from tangerines and bread, there was nothing. After I’d eaten a mandarin and some bread, a friend came up to me and told me that I should go to a forward position with Heval Silava. All my clothes were bloody from the previous night, but all the bullets had missed me. So my friends told me to go back to the forward position because the bullets wouldn’t hit me anyway. We had set up a total of three lines of defense in the city. When the IS attack started, they went straight at us with three tanks, heavy Dochka machine guns and men running behind on foot. Heval Silava fired a rocket from the RPG, but unfortunately the shot missed.
Our position on Mishtenur Hill could no longer be maintained. Me and Heval Silava wanted to retreat from the building. We didn’t get far, after a few meters we had to drop down. Now we were also being shot at from behind. The enemy had entered the Kaniya Kurda district, which was to our rear. When I jumped behind a wall, a bullet hit me on the left hip and exited at the shoulder. Heval Silava was also hit. They were probably snipers. The IS fighters were then only five meters away from us. They could have easily killed us in this situation, but they wanted to capture us alive and then behead us. This method was intended to destroy our morale and our psyche.
Our commander, Heval Medya, managed to make her way to us. She shouted at us to get up and run. I was unable to do so and fell unconscious. In my mind’s eye, I saw wheat fields over which I was flying, which was very beautiful (whistles softly). Then I woke up again, on the back of a friend. I was taken to an ambulance. There I was given whistles the whole time so that I wouldn’t fall unconscious. Me and another friend had to be taken to Urfa for treatment because of the severity of our injuries. They couldn’t treat me there either because too much blood had collected in my upper body. They said I had to be taken to Amed. I was unable to speak. But I could hear the doctor’s words quite clearly: “Maybe he will survive”. The ambulance ride to Amed took several hours. In the meantime, I was out of breath….
…. I only opened my eyes again in hospital four days later, I was in a coma. After 12 days, my friends had to take me out of the hospital because the Turkish police were in the hospitals looking for injured friends. I was then illegally taken back across the border to Derik, where I was able to gather my strength for a month. Then I went back to Kobanê.
Kobanê was an essential experience in the history of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement. Few organizations in the region have been able to develop such a practice in urban warfare. Can you tell us what the warfare in Kobane looked like?
We had to fight day and night. I still remember the cold very well. Almost all my friends were wounded. One friend, for example, had maggots in his wound and my wound was also very badly infected. A doctor looked at our injuries once a day. We fought on regardless. Bit by bit, we managed to drive IS out of the city, which shifted the fighting back to the villages. People from all parts of Kurdistan came to Rojava to defend the city. There were also Turkish internationalists from socialist and communist organizations in my cab. I also met two Kurdish women who had come to Kobanê from Europe and died there. It is also a reality that some of them came to the front and died right there before they even drank a glass of water in the city.
The images of Şehîd Arîn Mîrkan are still clear in my mind. She blew herself up to stop the advance of IS. Other friends sacrificed themselves alongside her. Another friend, who later fell in Raqqa, had already pulled the pin out of his hand grenade in one situation and then realized that it was not enemies but friends who were approaching. He then wrapped his hand around the grenade so tightly that the rest of us didn’t get any shrapnel. But he lost his forearm in the explosion. Another friend, whose entire skull had been torn open by a bullet, continued to fight with just a cloth bandage. Later, he also died in battle. All in all, you can say that we all had great hope and felt this deep friendship at every moment. We knew what we were dying for.
Many people around the world see the Islamic State as ‘evil’ par excellence. How did you perceive IS ‘face to face’?
Another day we heard terrible noise and cries of “Tekbir – Allahu Ekber”. We thought there must have been thousands of them. But we only saw one, which we then shot down. Only then did we realize that he had a loudspeaker strapped to his back. The IS fighters weren’t stupid and they didn’t fight badly either. I myself had no idea about war before I came to Kobane. I learned what I knew beforehand by watching war films. During the 40 days of training, we learned how to shoot. But I learned most of it during the war itself. For example, if there was a friend next to me who already had experience of guerrilla warfare in the mountains, I always asked them. I also learned from IS fighters how they move and where they take cover. If you want to survive, you have to use your head and learn quickly. In urban warfare, you move from house to house by knocking holes in the walls with sledgehammers. Of course, the IS did this at the same time. Whoever made it into a room first survived.
This is the 10th anniversary of the victory in Kobanê. Kobane has become something of a modern myth. What impact has the fight had on you personally? What has changed for the Kurdish people since the victory in Kobanê?
I didn’t actually come to Kobanê for the Kurdish people, but for Shengal and humanity. When you experience friendship in war and you see how someone throws themselves in front of a bullet for another friend, you never forget it for the rest of your life. I can’t explain the feeling very well, you have to experience it for yourself. When the international anti-IS coalition entered the war, the situation naturally changed and we no longer had the feeling that we were completely alone. When the planes started bombing IS positions, I jokingly said that we could sleep well from now on. Of course that wasn’t the case. During the war, we were happy if we could close our eyes for 1-2 hours at night.
Kobanê was as important as Stalingrad. You know that you are fighting for something and that fills you with pride. We always tried to rescue our own fallen. Sometimes four or five friends were killed. I can still remember that our unit wanted to rescue two friends. A team went out and seven friends fell. IS had planted a mine there. A second group then went off and 12 friends were injured. It was only when coalition planes arrived and there was a lot of dust in the air after the bombing that we were able to recover our casualties.
It was different with IS. If a normal fighter was killed, they didn’t care. But once we shot an emir. The IS fighters ran like madmen to the emir under our fire to pick him up from the ground. I’m sure 250-300 of them died in the process. At some point we ran out of bullets and then we stopped shooting.
In numerous revolutions throughout history, the craft of war remained the preserve of men. Women were forbidden to take part in it. In contrast, the extraordinary role of women in the defense of Kobane is often highlighted. How did you perceive the role of women in the war?
This question is very important. Many women have fought alongside us. The truth is that most women fought better than us men. The fact that they fought alongside us also gave us more strength.
When you fight alongside a woman, you feel pride.
I told you about when I was in the position with Heval Silava. At first she said that she was shooting at the approaching enemy with her RPG. In that situation, of course, I couldn’t say that I was afraid. Instead, I said: “I’ll shoot too”.
Women really played a major role in the defense of Kobanê. IS was also very afraid of women, especially with their “tilili” battle cry. Women were stronger than men and they were always in the front line. In my previous life in Germany, I saw women differently. For example, my mother and my sister, who were always supposed to take care of the children and make food. When you see that women fight twice as hard as men, then of course that changes such a world view. I could go on and on, but if you haven’t experienced it yourself, it’s hard to imagine.
What else would you like to pass on to our readers?
The resistance in Kobanê was a stab in the heart of IS and also in the heart of Turkey. The most notorious fighters and commanders of IS have been killed in Kobanê. These forces therefore still want to take Kobanê. IS has realized its mistake of trying to take Kobanê first before the rest of Syria. Nobody had expected such resistance. But there is now a danger that they will try to surround Kobanê by attacking from the Qereqozaq Bridge and Ain Issa. But every man, woman and child here knows that humanity was defended in Kobanê. If Kobanê had fallen, no one would have been able to stop the advance of IS.
Every village captured has meant ten new fighters for IS, every town a hundred. So the number of fighters has grown steadily. In the villages we liberated, I saw an IS fighter who didn’t even have a pistol and was walking on flip-flops. Four bullets from me had hit him, but he still ran towards us shouting “Allahu Ekbar”. He only collapsed after the fifth bullet hit him in the head. During the search we found a syringe and drugs. That was the case with a lot of IS fighters. In a battle at the Karakozak Bridge, we killed 17 fighters from the IS special forces. Among them were Germans, Greeks, Chinese and Africans. They were all very tall and carried large daggers. We found a Koran in German on the German. There were also Chechens, Kurds and Turks among them. If we hadn’t stopped IS in Kobanê back then, nobody would have been able to stop them. I don’t think they will attack Kobane. This is not only due to our strength, but also because Kobane has become a symbol for the world. But anything can happen in this life.
Photo: YPGà Kobané4,VOA,C0 via wikimedia