I remember the first time that me and heval Botan could sit and talk with a cup of cai in our hands. We spent the morning together planting trees on a riverside, digging holes and getting our hands on the mud, dreaming about keeping the desert out of the arid lands of Rojava. It was spring 2018, Afrin had just been been occupied by the mercenaries of the Turkish State.
Internationalist from different parts of the world had been fighting alongside the ranks of YPG, together with our kurds, arabs, assirians and ezidi sisters and brothers. Few months ago, the Sirian Democratic Forces were defeating ISIS in Raqqa, taking down their black flags from where before they had their capital. But the planes that were bombing daesh in Raqqa, the planes we use to celebrate, became then our worst enemy. In Afrin we had to learn what means to face an enemy that have support of NATO forces, we had to learn how to hide from the drones that killed so many friends in those olive fields.
With a cup of tea in our hands, around the young trees we just planted, we talked about the friends that couldn’t drink cai anymore, about those that came with us to Afrin but did not came back. Is not a conversation I was used at that time. Not yet. Dead in Europe is something we hide. Something we fear. A thing that we are scared of, and that we try to avoid at any price. And that day, we decided that those trees were for them, to remember the friends that fought with us, that gave their life to defend this land where the trees will grow.
After some months I went back to Europe, and I tried to talk about those trees and those friends. But people around was afraid, because they were afraid to talk about dead, as I was before. And then I stopped talking about them. I stopped talking about the war that I saw, because it was not the war that they saw. It was not the war of epic battles and cinematographic explosions we are used to see in the big screens. It was a war of mud, and cold, and waiting. A war of people losing their homes, of children running with broken shoes, of smell of dead and gangrene in the hospitals, of mothers crying at the funerals of their sons. A war to keep sane in an insane world.
Not even a year later after the war in Afrin, şehid Tekoşer fell fighting in the last city of ISIS. They two were good friends, they fought together. They crawled in the mud together, they stood in the cold and in the heat together, they waited together when the explosions ceased and the bullets stopped flying. Tekoşer did not came back to Italy as Botan did. He did not had to face the incomprehension of returning to a world that feels empty, feels superficial, feels guilty of the friends that we lost.
We came to Rojava looking for a revolution, and we find humanity. We find friends that, talking a different language, invited us to their homes and made us feel welcomed in ways that we never felt before. We find people in difficulties to survive between the car bombs and the strikes of the drones, between the prices of food rising and the daughters and sons going to the front lines for a better future, between the tents of refugee camps and the meetings of neighborhood communes.
But then non of that existed back home. We were returning to our mundane and boring lives, struggling to get a salary that allows us to pay the rent at the end of the month, the food during the weeks and the beers at the weekend. And the problems of our past were just there, waiting for us, piling up and adding challenges to our already damaged mental health. And life went on.
Heval Botan returned to Rojava, being never really there neither really here. A migrant in between worlds, two worlds separated by some hours siting on a plane and some days siting on a hotel, waiting to cross again the artificial borders of Kurdistan, navigating this globalized and confusing world that sometimes feels so alien. Not even a month ago we found out that heval Reşid, another YPG veteran, decided to put an end to his
life. I found out because Botan knew about it and decided to tweet it. On the screen of my phone, I saw again his picture, with the sad news that it happened some months ago but we didn’t knew about it. Not even a week when a friend was writing explaining that heval Botan had follow similar steps. I cried. For him, for Reşid, for Tekoşer, and for all the friends that we lost in this war. Because when we came to Rojava, we were fighting not only against ISIS, not only against the Turkish State mercenaries, but we are fighting against a system that is destroying the humanity that we found in Rojava.
We are fighting against a system that is forcing us to leave in fear and misery, knowing that someone is making a lot of money selling the bombs and planes that are killing our comrades, the tanks that crashed the olive trees of Afrin, the police cars and boots that are kicking our asses in the streets, the drugs that keep us stunned enough to not burn down this inhuman system of exploitation and insanity.
There are a lot of ways to fight this war, as there are a lot of ways to lose your life in it, and the enemy knows most of them. But there are also a lot of ways to keep fighting, and remember our comrades that are not anymore with us is one of those ways of fighting, to keep their memories alive, remember what they did and what they were fighting for.
And as long as we do it, their struggle will go on and on. This is how we fight, and this is how, one day, we will win. And it will also be their victory, because is the struggle they fought. We will carry on their struggle, because they can’t do it without us, and because they were, we are.
A partisan comrade of Heval Botan
