KOBANE, SYRIA — Menzeer al-Hamid has started smoking again.
Standing in his yard on a hill overlooking the city of Kobane, al-Hamid, a veteran ambulance medic, takes a drag and looks out across his hometown. Turkish jets can be heard roaring overhead, followed by the distant whump of bombs dropping in the countryside.
War is closer every day. And as a medic, al-Hamid has been at the center of the fray.
“We like freedom and peace — we don’t want to fight,” he says. “But when war came again to our doors, I said ‘I will go.’”
Kobane, a city of more than 100,000 people nestled on Syria’s northern border with Turkey, is best known as the site of a ferocious siege by the self-proclaimed Islamic State in 2014 and 2015, when the fundamentalist group sent waves of car bombs and kamikaze fighters to try and take the city from the left-wing Kurdish militia known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG. Al-Hamid sprung into action again in 2019 amid rounds of fighting between a coalition of Turkish-backed Syrian factions and the Syrian Democratic Forces — the alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias that grew around the YPG and that controls the region.
Now, Kobane faces the gravest threat in years.
In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime on December 8, Turkish-backed militias launched a ferocious ground offensive against the SDF, pushing them back to the Euphrates River, which now acts as a dividing line between the two forces. Turkish airstrikes against both military targets and civilians have been relentless: In the past week alone, Turkish drones hit a produce market in the nearby town of Sarrin, killing eight and injuring more than 20; in Kobane, another drone strike killed a young couple in their home.
In the span of six weeks, half of al-Hamid’s six-person crew was killed.
“As ambulance drivers we really love our work and doing something humane,” he says, coughing intermittently. “We heal our injured and bring back the fallen ones.”
Reporters with The Intercept recently spent 12 days in Kobane and found it effectively under siege. The city has been without electricity or reliable running water for nearly two months after Turkish airstrikes damaged the Tishreen Dam, a hydroelectric plant on the Euphrates River. Water is delivered by trucks, but it is impossible to meet demand, and the daily supply is barely enough to wash clothes or shower. The lack of heating and hygiene is a public health threat, and illness is rampant.
Aside from those families able to afford solar panels, most of the electricity in Kobane is coming from gas and diesel generators, whose fumes hang in a smoggy haze in the open-air market, or souk, at the city center. In the souk, hundreds of businesses are crowded into a small area, with entire streets shielded from aerial view by aluminum sheeting, blankets, and tarps in a defensive measure against Turkish reconnaissance and armed drones. Kurdish and Arab vendors alike are struggling to make ends meet, but business carries on: falafel shops, cellphone stands, beauty salons, and bakeries remain open.
Life is curtailed by sunset. After dark, residents mostly stay inside; when they do venture out, they use flashlights to get around. Barbers can be seen cutting hair with the help of handheld lights, or occasionally in complete darkness.
“We used to work until 10 or 11 p.m.,” says Mahmoud, 40, who runs a falafel restaurant in the city center. “Now, with the electricity cut, it starts to become dark around 4 or 5 p.m. Everyone brings their kids home, and we also close our shop. It is very difficult.”
In the weeks after airstrikes cut off power and water from Tishreen, Kobane has relied on an emergency water supply, pumped to the city by diesel-run generators from another location on the upper Euphrates, north of the dam. Only one of the four pumps was operational — but on February 2, an airstrike destroyed the last pump, destroying the backup water system entirely.
That has left residents to tap into a limited supply of groundwater underneath Kobane, a last-ditch effort that still leaves many residents without adequate access to water, according to Mexrad Bosî, co-chair of the Euphrates Region Department of Drinking Water.
“At least 10 unofficial wells in the city have come to our attention by now,” Bosî told The Intercept. “Many don’t have money to dig wells or buy bottled water. Humans always look for solutions, even if it means drinking dirty water.”
Photos: Maryam Ashrafi
The only road linking Kobane to friendly locales runs a circuitous route whose twists and turns add hours to any trip, leaving travelers and supply convoys exposed at all times to Turkish airstrikes, or to raids by the lingering remnants of the Islamic State who still haunt the desert to the south and east.
If the Turkish-backed forces were to cross the Euphrates, they could surround the city completely.
In January, civilian protesters began gathering at Tishreen Dam to call for an end to the attacks — and to support their relatives and friends in the ranks of the Syrian Democratic Forces against Turkish-backed factions just across the river. Turkish jets and drones attacked the protesters repeatedly on the roads leading to and from the dam and on the dam itself. In one video released on a pro-Turkish Telegram channel, a drone can be seen dropping a grenade onto a group of civilians performing a traditional Kurdish dance.
“The people know it is dangerous to go,” says al-Hamid. “But people go because their children are at the front, they go to show support to their children.”
Al-Hamid, too, knows the danger intimately. As the protests continued at the dam, members of al-Hamid’s crew had been traveling as part of a civilian convoy in support of a demonstration against the fighting. On January 15, Turkish jets struck one of the convoys, killing al-Hamid’s friend Omer Hesen. Another colleague, Mahir Muhammed, was hit and died of his wounds the next day. (The first friend to fall, Kurdo Bozan Khalil, 22, died in an airstrike on December 11.)
In the wake of the January 15 strike, a chaotic scene unfolded at Kobane’s main hospital as the wounded began to trickle in. Hundreds of locals turned up to see if their relatives were among the wounded or to donate blood. Multiple witnesses said the strikes seemed to specifically target the ambulances.
“There are international laws that state that ambulances should not be hit.”
“It is immoral, but Kurds are hit everywhere they are, even in ambulances,” al-Hamid told The Intercept that day, shortly after delivering his mortally wounded friend to the hospital in Kobane. “We cannot protect ourselves anyhow. We mark our ambulances clearly, and there are international laws that state that ambulances should not be hit.”
Days later, reporters with The Intercept met up with al-Hamid again at his home. At 53, al-Hamid was something of an elder on the team, and the deaths of his younger colleagues appeared to weigh on him. Omer, 47, left behind several young children. Mahir, 29, left behind a widow. Mahir was the only man left in his family, having already lost his father and brother to an attack by ISIS in 2015.
It was al-Hamid who had brought Mahir onto the crew in the first place.
“We wanted to support him, because his family had a lot of martyrs and was struggling financially,” he recalls. “I insisted we should provide work for him.”
Standing in his yard, he clutches a photo of Mahir and pauses several times to show it to reporters.
“We told them not to go. … We wanted to protect them, but they did not accept,” he says, his eyes welling with tears. “They were ambulance drivers so they insisted on serving their people.”
With international attention focused on the nascent, post-Assad state-building process in Damascus, the fighting along the Euphrates has largely flown under the radar. But the attacks by Turkey and its proxies in the former rebel coalition known as the Syrian National Army this week drew a strong rebuke from Human Rights Watch, which specifically singled out attacks on medics like al-Hamid’s crew.
“Striking an ambulance carrying wounded civilians on an open road is unlikely to be an accident,” Hiba Zayadin, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement Thursday. “It looks like a war crime, and the Türkiye-SNA coalition should be held accountable.”
After the deaths of Mahir and Omer, al-Hamid and his remaining crew began making aid runs to the dam in unmarked cars. It felt safer.
Photo: Maryam Ashrafi
Like the majority of Kobane’s residents, al-Hamid is Kurdish: part of an ethnic group linked by language and cultural tradition but scattered across enclaves in Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran after the geographic homeland was divided by international borders that date back to the lines drawn by colonial powers divvying up spheres of influence amid the remains of the Ottoman Empire. Without a state of their own, the Kurds have long faced discrimination in the countries in which they reside. In Turkey, the Kurdish language was suppressed, while in Syria, including the area in and around Kobane, the government of Hafez al-Assad — Bashar’s father — pursued alternating cycles of neglect and repression.
Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, Kobane — along with a patchwork of Kurdish-majority areas across northeastern Syria — has been under the de facto control of the YPG, which later merged with a handful of other militias to form the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF.
The autonomous region became known as Rojava — a word meaning “the west,” in reference to its geographic position within the Kurdish-speaking world. However, with the fall of ISIS territorial rule between 2017 and 2019, the regional autonomy expanded to the governorates of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor, both of which have majority-Arab populations suspicious of being ruled by a Kurdish-led administration. Amid efforts to overcome friction between Kurds and Arabs, the territory and the civilian administration of the region has been referred to with a more inclusive, albeit cumbersome, name: the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, or DAANES.
Throughout the Syrian civil war, Turkey has approached Kurdish autonomy in northern Syria with suspicion and hostility, largely due to the ideological and organization links between the SDF and the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which has been waging an insurgency against the Turkish state for nearly half a century.
The PKK emerged in 1978 as a Marxist-Leninist group fighting for Kurdish self-determination in Turkey. Over time the group and its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, have moved away from the orthodox Communism of the Cold War era and embraced an ideology of radical ecology, women’s freedom, and federal democracy inspired by the libertarian socialist philosopher Murray Bookchin. When the YPG rose up to declare Rojava as an autonomous region, they did so under the banner of Ocalan’s ideas — while denying any direct links with the PKK.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan considered the YPG to be little more than a Syrian branch of the PKK, and viewed the autonomous territory under its control as a safe haven for his enemies and a potential staging area for PKK attacks inside Turkey. At times, Erdoğan seemed to take a harder line against the YPG than against ISIS.
To Kobane residents who survived the devastation of war and worked hard to rebuild their city, the current crisis — now nearing the two-month mark — feels eerily familiar.
“We defeated ISIS in Kobane, but at the same time they burned down everything; our homes, houses, places, everything,” says Mahmoud, the restaurant owner. “We went to Turkey, Iraqi Kurdistan, or Europe and came back to build everything from scratch.”
“Now Turkey is doing the same,” he continued. “They want to annihilate the Kurds here.”
Photo: Maryam Ashrafi
Kobane is a city that remembers its past.
On the outskirts of Kobane lies the Martyrs Cemetery, where residents hold a monthly celebration to honor their fellow townspeople who have given their lives over the years.
To walk through the memorial grounds is to embark on a tour of recent history, illustrating the painful phases of expansion and loss that have buffeted Kobane and the rest of the region.
At the heart of the burial ground, now more than a decade old, are the graves of those who fell early in the war: civilians killed by an Al Qaeda suicide bombing, and row after row of men and women who died defending the city from ISIS in 2014 and 2015 when, led by the YPG, the defenders of Kobane held their ground against all odds through months of grueling, house-to-house fighting. The U.S. helped turn the tide by conducting airstrikes against ISIS targets identified by YPG fighters on the ground, but it was the YPG who held their ground.
At the time, ISIS had seemed unstoppable. Kobane proved that wrong. Kobane became a symbol of resistance across Kurdistan and beyond, and the dogged efforts of the YPG attracted worldwide sympathy, along with a wave of foreign volunteers.
The competence of the YPG fighters in holding off ISIS also caught the attention of the Pentagon, which had been looking — and failing spectacularly — to find a reliable partner on the ground in Syria. That need became especially critical as U.S. interest in the broader war shifted away from the Assad regime and came to center almost entirely on defeating ISIS. The coordination that helped turn the tide of the battle for Kobane — YPG fighting on the ground and calling in coordinates for airstrikes on ISIS positions by coalition jets — became a model for the fight to retake cities and towns held by ISIS over the next three years.
In its need for a local teammate against ISIS, the Obama administration chose to overlook the group’s not-so-subtle links to the PKK, a proscribed terrorist group. This put U.S. policy at odds with its NATO ally, Turkey and its president, Erdogan.
Amid Erdoğan’s bid to carve out a role as a powerbroker in Syria, the Turkish military had for years been forging links with various rebel groups. And as the YPG, and later the SDF, gained power and stability from its partnership with the United States, Erdoğan used these Turkish-backed rebel groups as a cudgel to pursue Turkish interests. In 2017, dozens of factions united under the umbrella of the Syrian National Army and eagerly joined in the Turkish war on the SDF. The most severe phase of this conflict came in 2019, when Turkish-backed groups invaded a strip of land to the east of Kobane, capturing several key towns along the border that they continue to control.
As a condition of a 2019 ceasefire deal, the YPG agreed to pull its troops and heavy weapons out of Kobane. To this day, the security presence in the city is remarkably low-profile, consisting mainly of lightly armed police.
In Kobane, the Martyrs Cemetery continued to swell with SDF fighters and Kurdish civilians picked off in the wave of drone strikes and targeted assassinations that have marked Erdoğan’s ongoing low-level campaign against the autonomous region in recent years, but on the ground, the conflict between Turkey and the SDF was largely frozen.
The stalemate broke in December, amid the lightning rebel offensive that brought down the Assad regime and installed a transitional government led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — a former Al Qaeda affiliate — and its leader, Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani.
As HTS fighters raced toward Damascus, the SNA turned their attention toward SDF and made rapid territorial gains with the support of Turkish air power. As the SNA advanced, it displaced an estimated 100,000 Syrian Kurds, many of them already displaced in earlier invasions by Turkey and its proxies.
By mid-December, the fighting was largely focused on the area around the dam and hydroelectric plant in Tishreen. Since then, fighting has continued on the ground just east of the river, and Turkish airstrikes have repeatedly targeted the dam, according to the DAANES civil administration.
Requests for comment to the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs went unanswered. But in reports by the state-owned outlet Anadolu, unnamed Turkish officials accused the SDF of using civilians as human shields at the dam.
“The terrorist organization will not be allowed to use humanitarian infrastructure facilities, disaster prevention efforts, or innocent civilians as bargaining chips,” the officials told Anadolu, which identified them only as “ministry sources.”
SDF officials, meanwhile, deny the allegations that they have been using human shields.
“There is no presence of the Syrian Democratic Forces on the dam,” SDF spokesperson Farhad Shami told The Intercept. “Civilians gathered at the dam to protest against the ongoing Turkish air and ground attacks, which target the dam and threaten its structure.”
In the first weeks of fighting in December, U.S. officials were working behind the scenes to bring an end to the fighting, and on December 24, U.S. troops arrived in Kobane and set up a small base close to the city center, raising the U.S. flag next to the main administrative compound in the city in an apparent signal of deterrence to Turkey. The troops departed a short time later, however, and by mid-January, the base sat empty, the flag lowered.
In a statement to The Intercept days before the inauguration of Donald Trump, a State Department spokesperson urged both sides to deescalate. Marco Rubio, Trump’s new secretary of state, has recently spoken in support of the SDF. But Trump has been known to overrule the opinions of his Cabinet, and in his first term, Trump’s position on the Syrian Kurds was characteristically scattershot. His administration initially followed the Obama-era policy of close coordination with the SDF, leading some in Kobane to view Trump with such fondness that one businessman named a restaurant after him.
But the love didn’t last: Despite the critical role the SDF played in the war against ISIS, and the more than 10,000 of its troops who fell in battle over those years, Trump left the Kurds in limbo in 2019 when — immediately following a phone call with Erdoğan — he abruptly decided to withdraw all U.S. troops from northeastern Syria, paving the way for the Turkish invasion of the region that year.
Syrian Kurds felt deeply betrayed. The restaurant named for the 45th president removed any mention of him.
But it’s now unclear what stance, if any, the Trump administration will take. The Intercept reached out to the State Department last week to clarify the administration’s position on Turkish aggression against the Kurds. No one responded.
Now, in Kobane, the cemetery is growing at the fastest clip in years. Since the SNA launched its eastward offensive in December, more than 120 people have been buried in the newest section of the graveyard — among them Mahir Muhammed, the colleague of Menzeer al-Hamid killed on January 16.
Photo: Maryam Ashrafi
In another corner of the city across town from the Martyrs Cemetery, a few feet from the border, lies another monument to past conflict. While most of the city has been rebuilt since 2015, residents of Kobane have kept a few blocks of the city in the condition it was left after the siege, referring to this area as “The Museum.”
Away from the sound of generators in the living city of Kobane, flocks of birds fly in eerie silence over the rubble, which is still strewn with the signs of battle, including the bones of ISIS suicide bombers who died in the failed invasion. Across the border wall, the Turkish flag flaps in the wind, looming over the destroyed areas and the rebuilt city alike.
The Kurds fought off the Islamic State, and despite repeated attacks by the armed forces of Turkey and its proxies in Syria, they carved out a statelet for themselves, pursuing a radical social revolution that saw the empowerment of women and a relative stability that eluded much of the rest of the country.
Al-Hamid’s home is a testament to this. In the years since the siege left most of Kobane in ruins, his family has rebuilt their house, added solar panels, and planted olive, fig, and apricot trees. In one corner of the yard sits a pile of metal rods under a tarp, the structure of a large tent that Hamid says he is ready to erect to support any refugees who might need shelter in the coming months.
And back in the souk, at the center of Kobane, life goes on.
“For us it doesn’t matter if we are full or hungry, without water or electricity,” said Brader, a 60-year-old restaurant owner.
“We are very resilient people,” he said.
Additional reporting by Maryam Ashrafi. Hilsman, Sulku, and Ashrafi reported from Kobane, Syria; Hurowitz reported from New York.
