On Patrol In ISIS's Old Capital

bunch of a racky civil defense guys. While I sat and drank tea. They ripped out the wiring from an old refrigerator and used it to connect an old CRT television to a generator. They succeeded, and we spent the night drowning out the sounds of gunfire and death with a blurry subtitled transmission of the film Clear and Present Danger. Today, we are driving to Rocca, the former capital of the Islamic State, to embed with one of Rojava's military units.

This will not be an exciting war story, full of blood and guts and daring dew, but it is still a war story, because every story that comes out of Syria today is in some way a war story. Let's talk some more about Rocca. More than three quarters of the city was leveled during the battle to liberate it, and as is usually the case with violent liberations, very little was left behind aside from shattered buildings and shattered lives.

The stf have been criticized for the level of destruction they wrought upon the city, but the bulk of the actual damage was done by air and artillery strikes conducted by American guns and American planes. It was an ugly fight, as sieges of cities always are. In the modern era, military planners have developed a new term, feral cities, for what happens when an urban area within a state passes

out of the control of that state. The United States military has spent years developing special small unit tactics for fighting these sorts of wars, but when it came to Moslin Rocca, they let local forces do most of the dying and supported them instead by blowing up whole city blocks. I caught several chunks of the battle from Mosele myself, and I have failed ever since to adequately describe the brutality I witnessed, and from everything I've read and heard,

Rocca was just as bad. There are very valid arguments that more of the city was destroyed and more of its people killed than was necessary. Some of the blame for this surely falls upon the SDF, who, after losing more than eleven thousand of their comrades in battle, took every opportunity they could to avoid fighting door to door. A good deal of the blame, though, must also fall upon the Trump administration. The man who campaigned on bombing

the ship out of ICE's delivered on that promise. At least civilian casualties as a result of US air strikes increased massively after Donald Trump took office. By two thousand nineteen, annual civilian deaths caused by American action in Afghanistan alone had tripled. Rocca's destruction also amped up significantly under Trump, just as his administration laxed reporting requirements for the Department of Defense and effectively made it much easier for them

to avoid telling anyone about deadly air strikes. In April two thousand nineteen, Amnesty International released a report titled Rhetoric Versus Reality, How the most precise air campaign and history left Rocca the most destroyed city in modern times. By some counts, up to eighty percent of Rocca was leveled. As Jake and I shower and dress and pound Mahmud instant coffee, the worst instant coffee on God's green earth. I think about what it means to be the most

destroyed city in modern times. When I visited Mosel, there were places where buildings and the people in them had been pounded into a substance finer than sand. I literally cannot picture a more destroyed city. I will admit to feeling some nerves ahead of this trip too. Our goals that day were twofold to interview the co presidents in charge of defending Rocca and to go on patrol with a squadron of SDF fighters in search of ISIS sleeper cells.

The former capital of the Islamic State is still filled with its soldiers dashies as some call them. They'd carried out several attacks in the days before our arrival, and it was made very clear to us that Rocca is one of those places in the world where just about anything could happen. During our visit, we meet Kabat a bit after dawn, and after pounding down another terrible coffee and smoking a cigarette that actually tastes good by comparison, we pile into the van and roll off down the road.

On the way, we see a line of gas trucks, dozens long, waiting for their chance to cross into the regime controlled chunks of Syria. These trucks are part of the devil's bargain that Rojaba has struck to ensure its survival. The fuel gives them critical leverage against the Assad regime. If the government gets pushy, they can throttle the flow of oil and stop serious tanks in their tracks. We stopped for breakfasts and tell Tamar, a small mixed Assyrian,

Kurdish and Arab village. Kabbat takes us to a little roadside stand and orders eight or nine oblong flatbread pizza styled dishes. They're delicious. All of the food here is delicious. This is what is this uh ratter mind. We get to talking a bit of shop about our experiences with war zone journalism, and we soon move on to the subject of cigarettes, which are almost an item of religious significance to soldiers at the front. If you embed in

an Iraqi military unit. You will be offered many, many cigarettes, and you'd be kind of a dick if you turned one down. It's just the way Howbat informs us that in this regard, things in Rojava are not wildly different from things in Iraq. One thing this place never run short of is cigarettes. No. I'm I stand all the front lines, and everyone's smoking, everyone never sometimes not smoking. But I remember one journalist he quit smoking for a few years, and he came to here and he wanted

to interview one of these Swedish eyes. Did they he arrived band they stopped at all the interviews at camping. In the evening, I found him on the stairs. The conversation moves on and Jake talks about a friend of his who was stabbed to death during a robbery gone bad back in his hometown. There's a lot of talk about what leads to such utterly pointless crimes and how they can be more unsettling than the targeted violence from

groups like ISIS. Kabat tells us that she's glad her brother died fighting for something at least as opposed to falling in some random cruel tragedy. She tells us she thinks stuff like that is less common here, perhaps because death from other things is so much more common. It's a sort of conversation I've had before. I was in Dublin, Ireland, at a hostel on the day after the two thousand twelve Sandy Hook shooting. I went up drinking and talking

about the massacre with a Venezuelan friend. Now he'd actually seen people murdered for their property with his own eyes, shot to death by masked men on motorcycles in the streets of Caracas. Even so, he was horrified by the idea of a school shooting like Sandy Hook. People kill each other here, he told me. But no one does that. No one does that. After a couple hours on the road, we arrive at the STF Media office. It's a dusty, gray white compound of several buildings that looks like it

used to be a private business. Today it's where the sundry militias of Rojava interface with journalists. We will come to know this place very well. There's a gate to the compound and a WYPG man guards it. I notice his A K forty seven as we pass by. He's customized it beautifully with a colorful rap for the magazine that turns it into a copy of the WIPG. Patch. On his shoulder there is a single bullet mounted to the top of the barrel, stored on a little pop

out container. Hobat explains that this setup is common among the soldiers of the WYPG. The last bullet is to use on themselves rather than be captured by Isis. We enter the office and sit down for the requisite Kurdish ta with a man who very much wants to be our new friend. Mr. English. That's not his real name, but it is what he seriously called himself and what everyone else in the office sort of I rollingly called um. Mr English is an SDF Media liaison and an English

literature major. He has powerful dad joke energy, and he is supremely excited for a chance to put his English speaking skills to use. Are you go? Yeah, you are, Yeah, you are here, you are American? Here you go? And Americans say, um, So, if if a brick goes into the shop, I say, yeah, please, can I have that? Americans say can I get that? We sit and sip coffee and answer just a whole bunch of questions about

our language from our very excited new friend. While we do that, Kabat talks to sdf officers and works out the final arrangements for a trip to Rocca. She works, and Jake and I listened to Mr English talk about his daughter. He shows us many pictures and Bragg's that she just graduated college in Aleppo with an engineering degree.

Like many in Rojaba, she found herself in the awkward position of living in the Autonomous Region of Syria, which rejects government contr role, but going to school in regime territory. The whole conversation occurs in what is essentially a waiting room with walls bedecked in pictures of the SDFS martyrs. Directly above my chair is a plastic box with a camera in it. Underneath the martyr's photo. Mr English explains to me that this is the camera that man was

carrying when he was shot dead. Working for the SDFS Media division at the front lines, it's a fun thing to see right before you go to inim bed as a member of the media with a military unit looking for isis guys. We receive approval to drive into Rocca, all right, so it's uh am Wednesday, j and we're on our way into Rocca. Rocca looks a lot like Moslded when last I visited. The destruction is extensive, but it is markedly less scary than we had been led

to exp act, at least so far. A decent amount of repair work is clearly underway. Already we passed lively streets filled with people in shop stalls, and then a block or two later we'll hit streets that have been absolutely leveled by high explosives. They're like islands of life in a sea of death, or like anti tumors of some sort of weird reverse cancer, slowly taking back the ruins. As Alan's van whirls over cracked and broken streets, we

in the van share a lively conversation about suicide. I noticed when we uh the guy guy who was on guard duty had the bullet mounted on the top of his a K forty seven. This reminds Jacob, a Kurdish fighter he used to know have All kim All who found himself cut off after a firefight surrounded by isis lovely guard. You won't look down in a house grenade. Yeah, oh my god, Yeah, it's great. I'm one of the other send me the picture. I was like, why, why do you do this? I don't want to see this.

We stopped by the side of the street and Kabat's friend, Ahmed, jumps into the car with us. He's a lifelong Rocca resident who now works for the SDF. Ahmed lived here back when Isis was in charge, and interestingly enough, he found them okay. At first, crime went down at least, he tells us with a shrug, but over time things grew markedly more brutal. In the years since Rocca fell Or was liberated, Ahmed started working with the SDF. He tells us he's happier with them and that he likes

seeing Arabs and curds eating together. I asked him if it took him getting used to going from dash control to working with a woman like Kabat. In response, he swings his arm around Kabat's shoulder and fixes me with an easy grin. He says, Kabbat is my best friend. Of course, Kabat brings on that a lot of work and he makes a nice side business helping to set

up and arrange inbeds and interviews with the SDF. I don't know the man but he strikes me as the sort of very friendly, very charming fellow who will find a way to make a decent life for himself under any system. We stop outside a large complex of buildings based around what looks like it used to be a very large office park, has been appropriated by the Syrian Democratic Forces as part of the Nerve Center for their

soldiers defending Roca. Armed men and women of the YPG and J form a buzzing hive of activity outside a regular procession of technicals. Toyota trucks with machine guns mounted in the beds passed through on their way to conduct patrols. Jakobot and I will be heading out with one of those patrols soon, but before that can happen, we've got to have a meeting with the two code presidents of the Rocket says. I've had a lot of meetings like

this when I was in Iraq. We'd be trying to secure an embed up at the front, and first we'd have to hang out with a room full of Iraqi generals and colonels to put in some FaceTime and get their permission to go forward. This generally meant an hour or two of watching Ammirati television and drinking Shi coffee. We'd have long winding conversations that would end with one of the generals telling us we could go up to the front. Now my experience with the rocket Defense Counsel

would prove very different. We are led into see the co presidents of Racca Za sayish of all Czechick and have al Kabat. I realized that's confusing. Unlike our Kabat, this one is a man in his miss fifties. Of all Cechick is a woman of about the same age. This is my first time seeing a woman in one of these general level sit downs before embedding with a unit. At first, she pays us little attention while her male

colleague answers questions. Of all, Cichick is busy juggling multiple cell phones and a regular stream of subordinates, starting in and out with questions and answers. She wears urban pattern camo fatigue pants, sneakers, and a dark gray Safari shirt. She has a square, serious face and hard eyes. Jake and I exchange some polite q and a's with their colleague, but Cichick is the person we really want to talk with, and after twenty minutes or so we succeed in getting

her attention enough for a serious interview. I start by asking her how Rocca, the city that spent years under the thumb of hardline and seriously misogynistic Islamic militants, adapted to having hundreds of armed women patrolling its streets. Of course, as hard, things were difficult until the people here started to believe in us. There were many times when people refused to recognize our authority. They would say, these are women. How can they pretend to administer our city? How can

these women be in charge of us? Some people would even lecture us and say it is morally wrong for women to wear that sort of clothing. Women should not be in the security forces at all, have all. Chichik explains that her process of building personal trust in the community has been slow and mainly focused around repeated, firm

but polite conversations with leaders in the community. We made them understand after so many conversations, they accepted that I was determined and there was a place for me in this community. It's not as difficult now. I'm sure determination was a factor, but I'm equally sure that the sheer number of guns have all Chicheck and her comrades could bring to bear had an impact on them being taken seriously.

She more or less confirmed this when I asked her for her take on how this new system had come together. We seized it. I asked what she saw as the importance of having both men and women out on the street protecting their community. Women have an important role in this. Why because if you don't have any women in the security forces, then the women in that society will not be able to communicate with the men on an equal level.

We got to talking a little more about her background and what her life had been like before the revolution. She told us that as a young woman living under a SODS dictatorship, she'd thought about doing this kind of work for years before she ever got the opportunity. Whenever I would pass through a regime checkpoint, I would daydream about what it would be like to take over from them.

I thought, after all the violence we've experienced at their hands, we would have to be more democratic if we were in their position. And so Once Isis was defeated, the SDFS goal was not just to occupy the city, but to actually give the young women here who'd spent years living under isis a chance to take control of their own lives after the beginning. After we secured the city, we immediately started recruiting women for the SASH. Seventy women joined.

The women took their place everywhere, the checkpoints office, media office, commissary in the bureau, the administration, the patrols, and communications in every place. Jake and I brought up that in our own countries women had only very recently been allowed to apply for frontline combat roles. I told her that this was controversial among many men in my country who thought women weren't as capable of doing these kinds of jobs.

That is the system preventing women from empowering themselves. When women are empowered, man's power deserts him. At this point in the conversation, have all Habbat spoke up as a man, if there's a woman on your side, your work becomes easier. He brought up American style democracy and questioned whether or not men and women are really equal in my country. In the United States, how many women do you have in government and so they don't get to make decisions?

Trump says, I withdraw, and he withdraws. There's a woman next to him, but she is just for decoration. In the American Congress, likewise, there are women, but they cannot take any decision. It's men who are in charge. He points out that gender balance is one of the key advantages of the co presidency system, which he says frustrates the u US forces that they work with on a regular basis. The Americans ask us what is this code

chair system? They didn't like it because having two points of contact made things more complex than our military prefers. But as have all, Kabat pointed out, if the chair were alone, it would probably be only one man, and that's not right. You suppress half of society. A young soldier comes to the door and signals that our ride

is just about ready. I have time for one more question, and so I asked haval Cichek, how many people in Rocket today she thinks, really support the new system and the gains for women's rights, and how many wish things would go back to the way they were under Isis or the Assad regime. The men in public, they say they want women to be empowered, but inside, in terms of the essence the mentality, they don't change. The masculine mentality cannot be changed. She fixes her partner with a

strange look that I can't quite read. I don't know either of them well enough to tell if this is a joke between the two of them, or if she's suddenly signaling something about hal Kabat. I thank them both for their time, and then we head now the stairs to meet them. Men and women that will be going on patrol with we're getting on the truck. Oh no, I can we meet them down at the base vehicle pool. It's a happening location filled with a couple of dozen

very busy men and women. The unit will be going on patrol with is twelve strong, ten men and two women. They're busy loading their two RpK medium machine guns into the beds of the two Toyota Highluxes that will be writing into hopefully not battle. I should stop here to say a little something about the high Lux. We don't have them in the United States. Our equivalent would be the Tacoma. And on the surface, that's all. The high

Lux is yet another regional Toyota pick up. But if you travel the sundry war zones of planet Earth, the single most common vehicle you see won't be a Humby or some other military jeep. It won't be a tank or an armored personnel carrier. It'll be the noble high Lux bearing men and women on their way to war, or acting as a mobile gun platform for some armed

force on a budget. Over the years, I've seen high lux is mounted with anti vehicular cannons, grenade launchers, heavy machine guns, and one time a recoilist rifle the size of a motorcycle the SDF high Lux as we hop onto our humble By comparison, the machine guns in the back don't even have a permanent mount. They rest on the top of the cabin, perched on a stack of rugs. The largest man in each vehicle holds the gun in

place on our drive into downtown. I don't speak Arabic, the language used by all the soldiers in this unit, so I couldn't really judge what they were saying, but it was easy to pick up on the general vibe of the unit. Most of them were from seventeen to nineteen years old, with the two women in the unit being seventeen and eighteen. The oldest person was a man in his early twenties with very cool sunglasses. Before we

loaded up. Both the young women seemed to mostly stick with each other, but when the go time hit, they both hopped into separate vehicles. The less populated districts we drive through on our way to downtown Rocca have been just utterly leveled piles of rubble that are themselves the size of large buildings loom over us. It reminds me

a lot of mosle. A man with a rifle could lurk behind any of the broken windows or bombed outdoor frames we pass, but none do today, as our drivers do the vehicle equivalent of elbow their way through traffic. Jake and I talk with the soldiers about what it's like to patrol through the streets of your own shattered home. It's so grateful for us because it's apart from our body can. For example, he's saying that seeing his hometown like this hurts him as much as it would hurt

him if he'd lost his arm. Seeing the ruined skyline of Rocca is like looking at his own severed limb in the dirt. As we near our destination, Jake turns to the young woman in the truck with us. She's just seventeen, and she looks like she should still be in high school. I know I had friends back in the US who joined the Marine Corps at age seventeen, but it's still strange to see someone so young in a uniform holding a gun. Jake asks her a question. So we're in a city right now where women were

enslaved and they were killed. They had no rights, so they couldn't even whoop the streets, you know, without covering the whole faces. Now you're here and you'll keep in the city's safe as a female with the we was like completely banded to be out of the home round cover. But low I am participating more effectively. It slight a free She's saying that under ice is she was banned from even going outside if she was unescorted by a man.

Now she's free to participate in society, and she's decided to do that by picking up a gun and protecting her community. We had a traffic circle in the middle of town, and both trucks pulled sideways, blocking off sections of traffic and bringing the stop and go action of midday rocket to a stop. The young soldiers were with pile out of their trucks quickly and set up a pair of air SAT's checkpoints, drivers are briefly questioned and forced to show documents. In a few instances, cars are

searched inside and out for contraband weaponry. I spent a lot of time looking at the faces of the people in the traffic and the people being searched. Rocket is not a normal part of Rojava, and the streets feel profoundly different. For one thing, there are an awful lot of angry people here. Equal numbers of men and women on the streets seemed to both fall into this group,

but they express it differently. The angry women tend to wear full nikabs with only their eyes visible, and they turn away from us as soon as we see them. The angry men are different. They tend to be much older. Most are in their late forties or fifties. They have hard faces, very long beards, and you can see in their eyes that they were much happier back when the previous folks were in charge. I particularly enjoy seeing the young women in our unit take licenses and give orders

to these men as they go about their business. I can see little girls on the street watching curiously, taking all this in. Whatever else is going on here, however, permanent the other achievements of the revolution proved to be. This is undeniably real. The memories in these young girls heads may prove to be the most radical accomplishment of the Rojhavin project. The patrol passes without violence, and after

a couple hours, we returned to the base. When we get back there, we see several smaller groups of soldiers preparing to head out. Our truck stops and we all get off and say oh goodbyes. As Kobat thanks our hosts, I find my attention drawn a few feet to the right, where the driver of another high lucks chats with one of his comrades, a short woman wearing a headscarf. She's pointing to different locations on the map, and he's nodding

in agreement with her. It's a small moment that's noteworthy for how normal it is here now, just two years after the Islamic State was kicked out. We say our goodbyes, pile into a lawns fan, and then we're off to the city of Kobani for the night. As we barrel down the highway, Jake Kobat and I talked about our interview with the two Asaish leaders. We met this morning. When we'd asked the woman of Alchichek about her early life, she'd given very few details, just saying that she lived

at home with her family before the revolution. That may have been true, but Jake suspected she was from the mountains. This is common local slang for she was in the p k K. A number of influential figures in Rajavan politics and in the military got their start in the p KK or Curdistan Workers Party. The p k K is the originally Marxist guerrilla group that helped to found

this place. Membership in the p k K is the kind of thing people talk about furtively, and there are a lot of false rumors as a result of this. The old fighters from the p KK tend to be quiet, stone faced, and hard. Kabat tells us that people used to spread rumors that she was from the mountains because she never wears any makeup. We enter Kobani in the late afternoon, just a little before sunset. Kabat takes us to see the city's enormous cemetery, which is several times

the size of the one in Komischlow. Kobani was the site of some of the bloodiest fighting against Isis, and the scale of death that occurred here is obvious in the rows and rows of colorful graves. We watched the sunset there. The orange light of the fading sun mixes well with the reds, greens, and yellows of these revolutionary graves. As I walked through the rows of dead, I find myself drawn to the dates of their birth and of their death. I do the math in my head with

every shahida pass. A terrible number sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old, a few or even younger. In the dark days when Isis laid siege to this town, an awful lot of kids were forced to take up arms to defend their homeland. Thinking back to the seventeen year old fighter we met in Rocca, I realized that many still are. Kobani is a city permanently shaped by the battle that ran through its streets from September of two thousand fourteen

to January of two thousand fifteen. It's been called the Kurdish Stalingrad. By the end of the fighting, more than seventy percent of the city lay in ruins. Almost all of it has been rebuilt in the half decades since, but a single destroyed neighborhood remains. The local communes in the city decided to leave it as a memorial and an open air museum. Kabat takes us there next, just as darkness hits. You can see everything just as it was rebel piled up into fighting positions, cars blown into

the sides of buildings, ruined tanks, pulverized masonry. It's not lost on me that from several of the old fighting positions you can see across the border into Turkey. Kobani has been called the city that stopped Isis, and the town's spirit of resistance is more than a little infectious. Kabat takes us next to the very center of town to show us the victory monument the people of Rajava chose to make to celebrate their struggle. It sits at

a roundabout in the center of town. In the middle is a tall white statue of a winged woman raising her arm in defiance as she beckons an unseen enemy forward in the universal gesture of come at me, motherfucker. At the winged woman's feet are two very Realisis tanks, both blown apart in heavy combat. It's she's saying that it's not like the other statue she's seen in her country, most of which celebrate a single powerful man, generally Bashar

al Assad or his father. It's also not like any of the bright posters of Ajalon that we've seen in most of the government buildings, and rose Java wasn't the flipping. At the time all this happened late July two, nineteen, the long term survival lords for a Java were pretty low, and they haven't exactly gotten higher in the months since.

There's only so much that revolutionary pluck and a defiant spirit can do against hell fire missiles, F twenty two bombers and all the heavy artillery that a major nation state like Turkey can bring to bear. Even so, as the months have passed and brought more stories of violence, disease, and the inexorable march of authoritarian governments worldwide, I still find myself inspired when I think back to that statue of a winged woman beckoning death forward and promising to

at least give it the fight. Oh billet chaw bill schau chau chau chau partijan game, don't be mory. The Women's War is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from My heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.