Long Shot: My Life As a Sniper in the Fight Against ISIS

by Azad Cudi

In September 2014, Azad Cudi became one of seventeen snipers deployed when ISIS, trying to shatter the Kurds in a decisive battle, besieged the northern city of Kobani. In LONG SHOT, he tells the inside story of how a group of activists and idealists withstood a ferocious assault and, street by street, house by house, took back their land in a victory that was to prove the turning point in the war against ISIS. By turns devastating, inspiring and lyrical, this is a unique account of modern war and of the incalculable price of victory as a few thousand men and women achieved the impossible and kept their dream of freedom alive.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Middle East, War, Military Fiction, Biography, International Relations

237 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 14, 2019

About the author

Azad Cudi is a 35-year-old British national from a Kurdish background. Based in London and Brussels, Azad grew up in eastern Kurdistan, where he was conscripted into the army and escaped to the UK. Aged 19, he was granted asylum and citizenship, learnt English and began working as a journalist for the Kurdish diaspora media. In 2011, Azad was working for a television station in Stockholm when the Syrian civil war broke out and the Kurds established their autonomous enclave. Azad's response was to fly out to Syria and work as a social worker, but as the civil war expanded he became a fighter in the volunteer army, the YPG.

Reviews

[JD · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great memoir by a Kurdish man fighting for the freedom of his people against the ISIS onslaught in northern Syria. I must say that this is something I did not know anything about, but this story is honest and well told by a man giving up everything to fight evil in the world as so many others alongside him did. In these days where people complain about their governments, and just want to get more rights while they already have all the rights that people can get, I think more people should read this to see what real oppression and suffering looks like under bad regimes and terrorism just to get a better perception of what the world really looks like out there. And then be a bit more thankful for what freedoms you have. Highly recommended read!!

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a surprise hit, a first book by a British citizen of Iranian extraction who left a comfortable life in England to fight in the Kurdish homeland in northern Syria. A deserter from the Iranian Army, Azad (a nom de guerre)details his escape from Iran by means of a human smuggler, his eventual arrival in Britain, and his gradual assimilation into British society. It was heartening to read that he was grateful for the opportunities afforded him in Leeds and disdainful of those who enjoy the benefits of free society while plotting the overthrow of their host.

With the rise of Islamic State, Azad made his way to Kobani in northern Syria where he was assigned sniping duties with the YPG, a military unit made up of mostly Kurds. There is a separate but equal female unit, the YPJ. I'm unsure why the units are separate, since they seem to fight together. In any event, his training must have been effective because he ended up with about 250 kills; a couple of other snipers in his unit had tallies of beard-boys that exceeded 500 apiece. That's mighty fine hunting, no matter how you look at it. Open season and no bag limit! In fact, word got out and a significant number of foreign fighters got in on the act, probably necessary as so many of the local stalwarts bugged out at the high port as soon as they glimpsed a truck full of whiskers. Maybe you can't blame them...I've been to northern Syria, and I wouldn't want to die for it either.

Fighting the bad boys of ISIS was dangerous work. YPG was using outdated military equipment while ISIS seemed to have the best of everything. YPG and YPJ took a lot of casualties. That was driven home when I examined the photos Azad used to illustrate his book: I thought it very careless of him not to block or pixelate the faces of the snipers...then it dawned on me....they were all dead! Every one of those brave faces was now underground! If it was sobering for me, it must be devastating for him.

In spite of his gruesome vocation, Azad has not lost his humanity. He doesn't shoot everyone on the other side, necessarily, and shows a reluctance to pull the trigger on those who are very young or who might be rehabilitated. He is still capable of admiring competence and bravery in his opponents, as this excerpt from ppg 176-177 shows:

"Now I could see that my target was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his late thirties. He was tanned, athletic and healthy, with a full head of long black hairand a short beard that he kept neatly trimmed around his thick lips. I had hit him once in either lung, one shot just above his heart, one slightly below it. A small trickle of blood ran from each wound. Beneath his strong arching eyebrows he had calm brown eyes. He was looking directly at me and his expression was composed and unafraid. He knew who he was and what path he had chosen and that he had reached its end. He did not beg. He did not surrender. He accepted his fate. And as I watched this man, proud in death, without fear or regret, I realised that with all we stood for, all our fine words about conduct and progression and morality, and everything we said about the Islamists' savagery and regression, in that moment I was being taught a lesson in dignity by a jihadi."

For a first book by someone who was raised speaking another language, I found this memoir to be nothing short of outstanding. Azad comes across as honest and honourable, and has provided us with a totally engrossing true account of brave men and women battling the odds, an account I know I'll be reading again, probably more than once.

[Charlie Hasler · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredibly powerful, moving memoir.

I feel embarrassed I know so little about these brave, inspiring, and exemplary people.

I think in the West the meanings of freedom and democracy have become so diluted and taken for granted, pithy almost.

I myself feel very nihilistic at the moment due to the way things are, and this book gave me a good kick up the arse and reminded me that humanity and decency not only still exist but people risk it all, for the very ideals so many of us take for granted.

This book has inspired me, on so many levels.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best modern war book I've read since Black Hawk Down. The author tells the compelling story of the battle for Kobani, a city on the Turkish/Iranian border. He relates his experiences as a sniper sent to defeat ISIS in a moving panorama of emotion and suspense. I found the book to be well balanced; it wasn't all blood and gore and certainly wasn't boring!!!

[Charles Haywood · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book appears, to the casual reader, to be propaganda designed to persuade a Great Power, the United States, to aid the Kurdish fight for independence. Like all good wartime propaganda, it grabs the reader’s attention and tugs at his heartstrings. But it’s double propaganda, cleverly done, because beneath the top layer of propaganda is another, artfully concealed. The goal of that second layer is to sell to Americans the Kurdish People’s Party (PKK), a crypto-Maoist combination of political party and war machine. And it’s the PKK, and more broadly the politics surrounding so-called Kurdistan, that I want to explore today.

I have no dog in this fight. I have no relatives or friends from anywhere close to the traditional lands of the Kurds; nor do I have any love for any of the traditional enemies of the Kurds, especially the Turks. It’d be just fine by me if Vladimir Putin defeated the Turks, reconquered Constantinople and crowned himself Emperor of Rome. Let’s not forget that the Russians nearly conquered Constantinople in World War I; more’s the pity they didn’t. Without any axe to grind, I’m a pretty objective observer of the Kurds—although, it’s important to note, like all Middle Eastern matters, the politics of the area are hugely complicated, and no doubt I have missed some subtleties. But I’m pretty sure I got the basics right.

What the Kurds call Kurdistan, though such a country has never existed, is a largely mountainous land comprising parts of northern Syria, southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, and northern Iraq. The Anglosphere has long admired the Kurds. Saladin was a Kurd, and back in the days of Sir Walter Scott, when he wrote The Talisman, the English were only too happy to believe in the nobility of the Muslim warriors who fought the papist Crusaders. More recently, the English encouraged the Kurds to rebel against their Turkish overlords during World War I, fomenting chaos to benefit the British Empire. And America has repeatedly encouraged the Kurds to the same end. That said, the Kurds are not our friends. Among other things, in modern times they eagerly cooperated with the Turks in the Armenian Genocide, and just because the various tinpot dictators around them sometimes treat them badly doesn’t mean we have anything in common with them. No doubt the desire to change this common-sense conclusion is what drove the publication of this book.

The Kurds today very often get positive press in English-speaking media. Of course, that suggests an ability to manipulate Western public opinion, which should perhaps have been a warning that all is not as it seems. After reading this book, I’m pretty sure that most of the exciting war stories in this book are primarily fiction, or exaggerations, in service of one overriding goal: to convince liberal Western readers that the cult-of-personality Communist ideology behind the PKK, created by one Abdullah Öcalan, whom his followers call Apo, is just like Western liberal democracy. To this end we are sold a story whose core premise is that PKK militias were the only important fighting force in the defeat of ISIS, which they did in order to become more like America, or more accurately, more like progressive America, say San Francisco. Needless to say, Donald Trump gets no credit for defeating ISIS, nor do the Russians, or anyone else, get credit for helping. The message of the supposed author of Long Shot, the pseudonymous Azad Cudi, is simple: given that the PKK’s fighters laid down their lives for us; the least we can do is give them Kurdistan, along with sole control over it. They’ll take good care of it. Promise.

So what is the PKK? If you listen to Cudi, it’s more or less like the left-wing of the Democratic Party. In reality, the PKK was organized in 1978, as a stock Maoist party dedicated to violent revolution. (Öcalan was a big fan of Stalin, as well—why limit yourself to admiring just one genocidal dictator?) The PKK is the political end; it is backed by two separate militias, one for men and one for women (of which more later), the YPG and the YPJ. The PKK was born in violence, primarily directed at Turkey, so it is no surprise that both the European Union and the United States have listed the PKK as a terrorist organization for decades. For many years it has engaged in low-level shootings and bombings in and around Kurdistan, using, among other means, suicide bombers. It has also killed many other Kurds who refused to bow to the PKK, including women and children; as with all Communist groups, a prime elimination target of the PKK is competitors, other Kurds whom they see as threats to their seizing total power. (The classic historical example of this is the Communist focus on eliminating left-wing competition during the Spanish Civil War, the focus of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.)

Not happy with this, treason from their point of view, the Turks seized Öcalan in Nairobi in 1999, with the help of the CIA, and have imprisoned him ever since, although they don’t seem to forbid him issuing an endless stream of writings and diktats to his followers. This curbed the PKK’s killing spree, and during the past twenty years, Öcalan has changed his tune somewhat. He now pushes a modified, somewhat eccentric, political program, mostly hardcore leftwing with an admixture of libertarianism, and claims he has renounced violence and Communist revolution. Now, the PKK’s propagandists uniformly push the party line—all they want is the creation of a “peaceful, egalitarian society,” to be formed in “democratic Kurdistan.” Maybe it’s even true that’s what they want, though I suspect their definition of such a democracy in practice is the same as all Communists—one man, one vote, once, under the guns of the PKK.

From what I can tell, there are many Kurdish political parties, which are organized not as parties of Kurdistan, which after all does not exist, but as parties in the countries that actually rule in that area. Thus, there is the Democratic Union Party (Syria); the Kurdish National Council (Syria); the People’s Democratic Party (Turkey); the Kurdish Free Life Party (Iran); and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (Iraq, whose armed wing is the Peshmerga who received significant Western press coverage during the Iraq War). When Cudi uses the term “Kurdish resistance movement,” though, he means the PKK. He never once acknowledges that any other entity could represent the Kurdish people, and you won’t learn that any Kurdish party but the PKK exists from reading this book.

However, what seems to bind almost all Kurdish political groups together, other than Kurdish affinity, is an extreme left-wing bent. The PKK is just the most extreme, or perhaps the most successful. Why this should be mystifies me. Most Kurds are Muslim, but religion seems to be of little importance to them, and many of the parties, or at least the leaders within them, not least Apo himself, are avowed atheists (as is Cudi). As to the PKK’s ideology, Cudi only gives vague descriptions of it, although interestingly, aspects of the “education” process in militia camps, as he describes it, bear an odd resemblance to the hierarchical gnosticism of Scientology. The result of this education is the ideological sloganeering of the most risible sort that is sprinkled throughout this book. “The reason the Middle East was beset by continual war and crisis, we argued, was because it lacked an example of a peaceful, stable, free and fair society.” “At the core of our philosophy was the conviction that all tribalism, injustice and inequality stemmed from an original act of oppression when man, the hunter-gatherer, abused his brute strength to violently subjugate his equal partner, woman.” “Completing [Öcalan’s] journey required private profit to be replaced with social profit. In practice, that meant embracing almost all forms of progressiveness, from organic agriculture to feminism to municipal decentralisation.” You can just picture this guy sitting in a Brooklyn Starbucks, trying to pick up women with his slick lines.

Cudi (assuming such a person really exists) is an Iranian Kurd, who fled Iran, deserting the army, in 2004. He snuck illegally into England, which instead of expelling him, welcomed him with open arms, and gave him “asylum” (from what is unclear), money and a job (after he first took an illegal job, in his first act of gratitude toward England). He lived in Leeds, in Yorkshire, where many Middle Eastern invaders live, and took the name “Darren,” while marveling at the cleanliness and organization of England compared to his homeland, which perhaps should give him a clue as to their relative merits. But he, in the manner of many such aliens, was dissatisfied and at loose ends—until another convert introduced him to the ideology of the PKK, which he adopted as his religion. Within a few years, he made his way to Turkey, eager to join the fight for PKK power, arriving in 2013. (All the borders in this area seem to be very porous, since Cudi and many others go back and forth over them.)

He fought in “Rojava,” a region in northern Syria carved out by various allied groups, including the Kurds, early in the current Syrian civil war. Rojava is the name the Kurds give it, wishfully claiming it is “autonomous and democratic,” although I’m pretty sure there haven’t been any elections, and each group in the area is only as autonomous as the range of its rifles. Bashar al-Assad doesn’t use the name, I’m certain, unless he spits while he does it, and no country recognizes such an entity, even if Cudi again doesn’t bother to mention that, or the many non-Kurds who live there. The wars in northern Syria, from my limited understanding of them, are primarily among groups seeking to detach the area from Syria. The Kurds are only one of those; their major opposition, other than the Syrian government, is Sunni groups such as ISIS. Behind and around this are other contests such as the Turks desiring to harm the Syrians, but not benefit the Kurds, and the Russians wanting to support the Syrians. A kaleidoscopic array of militias with shifting loyalties and alliances has arisen as a result of the Syrian war, and there are other occasional players, such as the Israelis, along with the United States supporting various groups at various times. The battles in northern Syria are all attempts at control with the assumption the Syrians will not simply take back the land themselves. It’s a gruesome mess, though as far as the Syrian war goes, my impression is that the least bad of the lot is Assad, but he has the worst propaganda operation.

The book centers around the Battle of Kobani, a real battle, lasting four months from late 2014 to early 2015, in which Cudi says he took part. (Cudi notes that Kobani is fairly close to Haran, the home of Abraham, to hook the American reader into recognition.) But passages that result in reader skepticism show up in the very first chapter, which describes Cudi’s last battle, before he was taken out of the line. Cudi was assigned to lead a small team to take an enemy-occupied hill, and gives a first-person, blow-by-blow account. In the second sentence of the book, we are told that a Kurdish saying is “the tree of freedom is watered with blood.” Maybe, but much more likely a ghostwriter stole that from Thomas Jefferson, knowing that an American audience would lap up this apparent resonance with American history. Then we are told that the Kurds have inhabited this land for fifteen thousand years, which is a gross exaggeration, though to be sure they have been there a long time—or at least some people with some common ancestry have been there, and really, if the PKK is as egalitarian as they claim, why the emphasis on Kurdish nationalism?

But those are minor hiccups. It is the military inaccuracy that is truly jarring, throughout the book. Cudi was the sniper in this engagement. He says he used an M16. This is unlikely; the M16 is not accurate enough or long-distance enough to be a true sniper rifle, although in competent hands it can be quite accurate. The same platform (Eugene Stoner’s AR platform) is sometimes used by designated marksman (technically not a “sniper,” but no matter), but only in customized, accurized versions. Cudi says he used a “night scope”—and then alternates between calling it that, and a “thermal,” which are very different things, and moreover, the vast majority of long-range military night scopes (and thermals) today are mounted separately from a day-vision scope, not combined units. Then he tells the reader that 550 meters “is close range for a sniper.” Not with the 5.56 cartridge he was using; at that distance, the bullet would have dropped five feet, and its kinetic energy would be quite low. Again, not technically impossible, but not typical, especially at night, and not desirable. Then he says “The stock punched my shoulder” when he shot. This cartridge and platform has essentially no felt recoil. After that he had a “jam,” whereupon he took out a cleaning rod and “pushed the bullet out.” Although there are malfunctions that involve bullets stuck in the barrel, they are extremely rare in factory-loaded ammunition. The usual jam involves removing a stuck or improperly-positioned cartridge from the chamber—but that does not require the cleaning rod, since the cartridge can easily be reached directly by reaching into the chamber, or extracted by simply yanking the charging handle. This apparently not having fixed the problem, Cudi says he took the gun apart during the middle of a battle. There are much better ways to address basic jams, and moreover, he incorrectly describes the assembly-reassembly procedure, suggesting he’s never really done it. Then, somehow, he realizes the magazine spring is defective, and “wasn’t pushing cartridges into the breech.” If that’s true, why did he push a bullet out of the barrel? None of this makes any sense—but it seems exciting to an American liberal who’s played Call of Duty and is eager to believe that the Kurds are helping establish a new government that Hillary Clinton would love, which is the story Cudi, or rather the PKK, is peddling here.

The rest of the book alternates Cudi’s claimed life story with sniper episodes from the Battle of Kobani. (We never get . . . . [Review completes as first comment.]

[Señora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Azad Cudi nos muestra una pequeñísima parte de lo que es vivir, y sobrevivir, una guerra a la que fue voluntario cuando no tenía por qué después de conseguir la comodidad de vivir en Europa.
Su forma de contarlo se mimetiza con su forma de vivirla, de forma que los meses de lucha son casi como una crónica sin dejar lugar al trauma y a los sentimientos hasta llegar al momento de poder sacarlos, y entonces nos hace partícipes de ellos.

Todo lo demás que yo pueda decir de este libro sobra, sólo que me ha gustado mucho y estará mucho tiempo en mis pensamientos.

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Longshot is a vivid and poignant memoir of the author's time serving as a sniper with the Kurdish militia in the war against the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, etc.). Visceral and gripping, it is one of the best war memoirs I have read in many years. Cudi's descriptions of the suffocating atmosphere in the rubble-filled hellscape that was the city of Kobani and the brutal fighting that occurred there rank right up there with those of Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa or Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943 . Through his sentences, I could hear the crack of the rifle and smell the rotting corpses.

Although primarily about Cudi's own wartime experiences, the book also serves as Cudi's autobiography, tracing his life's path from an idyllic boyhood in rural Iran and asylum in Europe to the ultimate fluorescence of his Kurdish identity and transformation into an activist and warrior for the Kurdish cause. The book also provides a brief primer on the Kurdish independence movement, sprinkled with Cudi's pro-Kurdish propaganda.

Lying in place in the cold, sometimes for days at a time, going without food and water while pissing himself, Cudi would stare through his sniper scope for hour after endless hour, waiting to take a single shot. For months on end, Cudi defended the shrinking perimeter of free Kobani, sniping from the shadows and watching his comrades die in terrible and senseless ways. Through the course of the siege, Cudi transformed from idealistic volunteer into unsentimental veteran. He had to or he would have died– or gone mad. By the end of his wartime service, his kill count reached into the hundreds and Cudi became a true force multiplier, with the ability to single-handedly dominate a battlefield.

Yet, this experience came at a steep psychological cost. Cudi paints a picture of his psychological descent into the abyss of violence, from his own shock and horror at making his first kill into what would become an addiction to war. The war consumed him, mentally and physically. At the end of his time on the front lines, the only peace he could find was in war. Not since Anthony Lloyd's My War Gone By, I Miss It So has such a grim autobiography of war exposed a man's revulsion and fascination with war.

Cudi's recounting of his formative years in Iran, his flight to Europe, and his embrasure of the Kurdish cause forms a fascinating backdrop to the battle scenes. He makes his support for the cause of Kurdish independence clear through his enthusiastic descriptions of the Kurdish militia units. These sections often read like (and may even borrow from) some of the most effervescent propaganda from Russia's Communist Revolution or the Zionist movement preceding the creation of Israel. The experiment in Kurdish democracy (at least in the way the author explains) is idealistic yet fascinating. However, Cudi's view of the movement is hardly balanced. In reality, the movement is not unified under a single banner dedicated to peace and harmony. The Kurds themselves have come into some valid criticism, including the PKK's presence on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations. The book does not suffer much from the effort and, if anything, Cudi's enthusiastic promotion lends credence to his wartime actions.

The book's only other weakness is in Cudi's portraiture of his comrades. While he does take the effort to flesh out some of his fellow fighters with personalities and idiosyncrasies, he leaves many others two dimensional. By the end of the book, I had a difficult time remembering who some of the other fighters were. At times, it seemed that Cudi introduced his comrades only to kill them off a page or a chapter later, like a nameless and unfortunate Red Shirt in Star Trek. I would have liked to know more about them – who they were, where they came from, why they fought, and what they were thinking.

In conclusion, this was a fantastic war memoir that ranks right up there among the best. It would have been easy for Cudi to tell a generic war story about an epic battle between the good Kurds and the (truly) evil jihadis of ISIS. Even a factual account would have been fascinating. A ragtag group of Kurdish militia, armed with old rifles and homemade grenades, managed to defeat the ISIS juggernaut, from whom the entire American-trained and equipped Iraqi army fled without firing a shot. Fortunately for us, Cudi takes us beyond the soundbites, beyond the lines drawn on maps, and deep into his own brutalized psyche. The result is a heartbreaking and imminently readable book.

[Himanish Prabhakar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book which is written around something very important, a memoir of the difficult times going in Syria. The way book is written is very good. So captivating and the scenes are described are so accurate that I feel them they are happening in front of my eyes. A lot of things written that people speculate about it, but this book definitely brings some light on the facts.

The facts that he explained about himself and how the war affected him is really great. I highly recommend this book. Thank you Netgalley!

[Sean Lemons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Depressing, but an incredible look into the front lines from a group of people who have been more effective than anyone else. So well written.

[Matthew Nesheim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an outstanding memoir.

In reading this book, you will get the real sense of a warrior going about his craft. And being a warrior really is a craft, as Mr. Cudi proves. The battles here are told in stark, efficient prose with a complete absence of ego. This is likely due to both the author's worldview and the fact that the Kurds have a unique warrior culture that includes women to the left and right of the men.

I've read other reviewers (Wall Street Journal included) comment that they didn't care for Mr. Cudi's politics, but in my view, a man who fights for something has a right to talk about it. Especially if he killed a bunch of ISIS on the way.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to read about what war really is. Especially if you've been thrown off by some of the more ego-driven memoirs of other warriors. As a warrior and a writer myself, I admire Mr. Cudi's contribution even if I do not agree with all of his political views.

5/5 stars.

[David Chabot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ayant suivi de loin ce qui se passait en Syrie et dans la zone que l'on nomme le Kurdistan pendant la guerre contre l'ISIS, j'approchais la lecture de ce mémoire du tireur d'élite Azad avec intérêt. J'espérais une bonne histoire détaillée, mais j'ai lu beaucoup plus.

En effet, le livre est à la fois l'autobiographie d'un des milliers de Kurdes qui ont pris les armes pour défendre leur patrie, mais aussi un ouvrage plus spirituel sur la conception de la liberté et du nationalisme de ce peuple malmené par l'histoire. Entre deux fusillades captivantes, l'auteur explique la conception très progressiste de cette société sans État, mais qui ne manque certainement pas de courage et de passion.

J'ai vraiment apprécié, mais la version française n'était pas parfaite. j'aurais préféré lire la version originale anglaise après considération.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received an ARC from Netgalley (thank you kindly) in exchange for a review.
I picked this because I love memoirs and thought the perspective sounded interesting. Can I just say Azad can write! This read like a thriller. Very engaging read. He also did a great job of being real about how war impacted his life.

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. The story is compelling, but the writing style is too.

[Joachim Stoop · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dat pluralistische vrijheidsstrijders-én strijdsters de barbaarse fanatici van IS verschalkten in het Syrische Kobani, vloeit als zoete ironie in de trotse vertelstem van de sluipschutter. Hoewel de memoires soms overhellen naar een Koerdisch heldendicht en hij zijn arendsblik wat meer mocht aanwenden voor een historisch, geopolitiek vogelperspectief, ontkracht dit amper zijn unieke focus op de krankzinnige frontlinie. Met de literaire munitie van Norman Mailer of Tim O'Brien was dit evenwel een gedenkwaardiger schot in de roos geweest.

[Vicki Andrada · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I saw this book, I wanted to read it instantly. It's because in the last few years the Kurdish struggle has become close to my heart. I've been interested in the Middle East for years, but it was the Syrian war that would really bring the Kurd's situation to me.

I wanted to read about what it was like for them to fight ISIS, I wanted to know what these brave and strong people did, and how it was for them to fight such awful evil! If not for them ISIS would clearly still be a threat. Not that they're nonexistent, as they are still out there, but they are greatly weakened because of these people.

Not only that, but the system they're fighting for in Rojava for the entire Middle East is very important. A place that has no democracy, except for the state of Israel, these people are fighting for that, and women's rights, so many things I can't begin to explain in this review. But, if you do decide to read this book, I urge you to go further than it, and seek out more information on the Kurdish struggle.

If you don't like reading about war, if you think you can't stomach it, this book will not be for you. It's not an easy read. But if you really want to know what it's like to fight such evil, what it did to one man, and some about his people, I would totally recommend this book. It was very educational for me. And it brought about many thoughts that I wouldn't have even approached in my mind if not for reading this. But there is so much I couldn't begin to stick to just a book review.

[Kate prefers books to people]

I am declining to give this book a star rating at this time because... I'm confused. (?)

This book is purportedly a memoir of a British national who fought against ISIS for the Kurds in 2015. I qualify that statement because after reading the whole thing, I am skeptical. It might be an honest (but very embellished) account of the conflict, but I have doubts and I just don't know. I feel like I just digested a media kit. Do I rate it as propaganda or a memoir?

The writer weaves pieces of his life story through the events surrounding the battle of Kobani in which Kurdish fighters faced ISIS in Northern Syria. He tells of joining the Iranian military, deserting, ending up in the UK with asylum, heading to Syria, becoming a fighter, and then going back to Europe after 2 years of fighting. If you accept this book as written, then the author is a living legend. It sounds like Marvel's Avengers against Sgt Schultz from Hogan's Hero's. I mean, yeah, the Kurds are outnumbered and lots of them are dying in this conflict, but check out the pics in the back... they're all taking out dozens of ISIS fighters (who basically have a death wish and might be trying to killed, according to the author).

At one point, he writes about watching half buried bodies (thinking that some of them might not be dead and might be waiting to jump back up and start fighting). The author touches one body and finds it is cold. Then he sees pieces of several bodies that he reports have pale skin and "ginger hair," and he jumps off into a brief discussion of how pointless it is for Islamists to come from Chechnya and Georgia to join ISIS. Um, ok, but somehow this guy coming in from the UK is different and makes sense. Can we normalize not going other places and shooting people?

I admit to knowing exactly NOTHING about modern Kurds, Kurdish history, etc. (I do have some Helly Luv music in my collection, but that's it). The way Kurdish leadership and YPJ/YPG ideology is presented here makes me want to know more. Are they talking about modernization and freedom or is there more to this? (I hate to use the "c" word, but this smells like communism). For instance, this book talks about radical gender equality with front line female units, property distribution, and a charismatic leader in exile. I am in the process of making a longer reading list about Kurdistan, Kurdish history, ISIS, modern Turkey, etc... please feel free to comment or dm me book recommendations if you them.

At one point, the author talks about fighters carrying 3 bullets of different calibers on their persons... the idea is that you don't know what gun you might be using when you get overrun, so if you need to commit suicide to prevent being captured, make sure you can do it with any gun you're likely to have. Um, yeah. Eye roll here. It didn't sound realistic. There's another part about viewing the bodies of a group of female fighters who refused to be captured. Combine that with the way that he talks about American air support, and I'm wondering if the subtext here is "gee, if only the rest of the world was willing to fight alongside our heroic fighters." Is this propaganda intended to sway public opinion into supporting a Kurdish state?

I'm not arguing for or against a Kurdish state... I'm not even sure that's what this book was aiming at. However, what I am against is continued American military involvement literally everywhere. Honestly, given our track record of arming both sides of a lot of these conflicts, us walking away benefits everyone and make a lot of conflicts less intense. I'm open to reevaluating this book later, but at this point, it feels off and I need more info.

[Marco C · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is what happens when poets and storytellers join a war.

It's a poignant memoir of a YPG (People's Protection Units" sniper in the crucible of Kobani.
As a sniper, the writer could see more of the battlefield than many of his comrades. As such we get more of a bird's eye view of the conflict.
The idealistic Kurds on one side, devoted to a relatively new progressive idealism, and ISIS on the other, their polar opposite.

Especially in the USA many will feel uncomfortable in rooting for this anarco-socialist group of warriors, but few will have the vocabulary and the will to denounce the intrinsic "goodness" of their ideals as expressed in egalitarianism, feminism, and protection of the Kurdish identity.

The Kurds are not an homogeneous group. Few Kurds are as radical as the YPG/YPJ. They are an ancient people, likely as ancient as anyone in the area. They are millions, yet do not posses an homeland. Most are as backward as their neighbors, yet they have managed to carve an identity as the most progressive, and western friendly people in the Middle East.

To betray the Kurds is normal, even accepted. Everybody has done it and the move by POTUS in 2019 to leave them for their Turkish enemies to slaughter is simply another chapter in a long history of betrayals.

Yet this book may cause some to rethink their attitudes, because their enemy at the time was possibly the most brutal and backward movement of the 21st century. Who wants to side with ISIS on this one?
And is anyone really on the side of Erdogan?

I am glad I have found this book written by this sniper poet. I just wish more people would read it.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book about the Syrian War in the Middle East. It is a very personal account of the fighting in the city of Kobani as seen through the eyes of the author who served there as a sniper. Most of the literature that I have read on the subject portray the Kurds, who have long tradition of fighting their oppressors, as a bunch of poor refugees who were running away from the fight. This book portrays them as they are: a proud and resilient race of warrior men and women who would like nothing more than to have their own homeland. Mr. Cudi explains what he went through as a sniper and the changes that occurred in him. I have read other stories about snipers, Russians, Finns, Germans, and Americans who had similar experiences. This is one of the best that I have read.

I recommend this book to anyone looking for a good war story, or who is interested in the war against ISIS from a Kurdish perspective. It is well written and insightful.

[John Pedersen · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s always hard to rate memoirs, because for me at least, it sometimes feels like you’re rating someone’s experiences. This is particularly hard when the experiences are extreme and traumatic.

I’m glad I read this book, despite how disturbing and awful it is to see a brutal conflict from the inside. The writing is clear and simple, and I appreciated the fact that Azad didn’t just cover the conflict, but more of his history and that of his family and area. I didn’t fully follow why the sections were in the order they were - mixing the war with the past was good (for a break from the relentless and meager life led as a sniper during an urban conflict), but I could not follow why the pieces were where they were in the narrative.

I’m also a bit of a history nerd and would have liked more context around the area and its context. If you’re looking for that, it’s not here. If you just want a spare and unflinching narrative about this stanza in our history of war, you will find it.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I passed through the Kobani border crossing in October of 1993 entering Syria from Turkey. I had met some Kurds on the journey and been warned by Turks about the “dangers” of passing through PKK controlled territory. I have since wished to learn more about the people and culture of this region and how their history differs from that of the Turks and Arab Syrians I encountered.

Long Shot is one combatants’ story of the struggle to turn back ISIS and liberate Kobani. The Iranian born author learned English during a brief exile in the UK and was able to eloquently communicate his personal narrative and it’s context within the greater struggle of the Kurdish people. Shot by shot commentary is interspersed with his personal experience growing up Kurdish as a people without a country.

[Karen K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential memoir written by a man who took up arms against ISIS in Syria. Suspenseful narrative details about Azad's inner thoughts and experiences braided with the setting: wartime Syria. Because Azad chronicles the ways that the Kurdish freedom fighters work together with coalition forces, the book gives a lot of insights into the situation on the ground in Syria today. What's at stake, who are the key parties to conflict, hopes for a peaceful future. Highly recommended. Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC. This book releases in February 2019: the sooner the better! The world must learn more about the different cultures and political pressures in this region.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unexpected autobiography of an Iranian Kurd who fled to England as a young man after being conscripted into the Iranian army, the unspoken purpose of which was to kill Kurds. He found meaning in fighting with other Kurds to wrest Kurdish areas from under ISIS. The writing is decent (the author acknowledges that this was his first real effort to put to paper both his experiences and his spiritual outcomes from the experiences) and the politics are consistent with other books I’ve read recently that portrayed the Kurdish experience. I must admit that I’m surprised that this book was in my library - it’s almost subversive.

[CB · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Having experienced combat and also read many books of others’ accounts, this book should be at the top of any suggested war novels to consume. Azad’s insight into war and the waging of war is immeasurable and poignant. To say that this should be a war classic is an understatement. One of very few voices in this international conflict, but so much emotion and resolve.

[CB · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Having experienced combat and also read many books of others’ accounts, this book should be at the top of any suggested war novels to consume. Azad’s insight into war and the waging of war is immeasurable and poignant. To say that this should be a war classic is an understatement. One of very few voices in this international conflict, but so much emotion and resolve.

[Tom Mahan · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you have ever wondered what it was like to fight on the ground against ISIS during their big surge, this book will show you. From a close you are there perspective, you can see what was involved in the battle against the take no prisoners religious fanatics.

[Romain · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I will tell them that I was still willing to die a hundred times for honour and respect, liberation and history, to live a life free from backwardness and blind ideology."

[Charles Haywood · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book appears, to the casual reader, to be propaganda designed to persuade a Great Power, the United States, to aid the Kurdish fight for independence. Like all good wartime propaganda, it grabs the reader’s attention and tugs at his heartstrings. But it’s double propaganda, cleverly done, because beneath the top layer of propaganda is another, artfully concealed. The goal of that second layer is to sell to Americans the Kurdish People’s Party (PKK), a crypto-Maoist combination of political party and war machine. And it’s the PKK, and more broadly the politics surrounding so-called Kurdistan, that I want to explore today.

I have no dog in this fight. I have no relatives or friends from anywhere close to the traditional lands of the Kurds; nor do I have any love for any of the traditional enemies of the Kurds, especially the Turks. It’d be just fine by me if Vladimir Putin defeated the Turks, reconquered Constantinople and crowned himself Emperor of Rome. Let’s not forget that the Russians nearly conquered Constantinople in World War I; more’s the pity they didn’t. Without any axe to grind, I’m a pretty objective observer of the Kurds—although, it’s important to note, like all Middle Eastern matters, the politics of the area are hugely complicated, and no doubt I have missed some subtleties. But I’m pretty sure I got the basics right.

What the Kurds call Kurdistan, though such a country has never existed, is a largely mountainous land comprising parts of northern Syria, southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, and northern Iraq. The Anglosphere has long admired the Kurds. Saladin was a Kurd, and back in the days of Sir Walter Scott, when he wrote The Talisman, the English were only too happy to believe in the nobility of the Muslim warriors who fought the papist Crusaders. More recently, the English encouraged the Kurds to rebel against their Turkish overlords during World War I, fomenting chaos to benefit the British Empire. And America has repeatedly encouraged the Kurds to the same end. That said, the Kurds are not our friends. Among other things, in modern times they eagerly cooperated with the Turks in the Armenian Genocide, and just because the various tinpot dictators around them sometimes treat them badly doesn’t mean we have anything in common with them. No doubt the desire to change this common-sense conclusion is what drove the publication of this book.

The Kurds today very often get positive press in English-speaking media. Of course, that suggests an ability to manipulate Western public opinion, which should perhaps have been a warning that all is not as it seems. After reading this book, I’m pretty sure that most of the exciting war stories in this book are primarily fiction, or exaggerations, in service of one overriding goal: to convince liberal Western readers that the cult-of-personality Communist ideology behind the PKK, created by one Abdullah Öcalan, whom his followers call Apo, is just like Western liberal democracy. To this end we are sold a story whose core premise is that PKK militias were the only important fighting force in the defeat of ISIS, which they did in order to become more like America, or more accurately, more like progressive America, say San Francisco. Needless to say, Donald Trump gets no credit for defeating ISIS, nor do the Russians, or anyone else, get credit for helping. The message of the supposed author of Long Shot, the pseudonymous Azad Cudi, is simple: given that the PKK’s fighters laid down their lives for us; the least we can do is give them Kurdistan, along with sole control over it. They’ll take good care of it. Promise.

So what is the PKK? If you listen to Cudi, it’s more or less like the left-wing of the Democratic Party. In reality, the PKK was organized in 1978, as a stock Maoist party dedicated to violent revolution. (Öcalan was a big fan of Stalin, as well—why limit yourself to admiring just one genocidal dictator?) The PKK is the political end; it is backed by two separate militias, one for men and one for women (of which more later), the YPG and the YPJ. The PKK was born in violence, primarily directed at Turkey, so it is no surprise that both the European Union and the United States have listed the PKK as a terrorist organization for decades. For many years it has engaged in low-level shootings and bombings in and around Kurdistan, using, among other means, suicide bombers. It has also killed many other Kurds who refused to bow to the PKK, including women and children; as with all Communist groups, a prime elimination target of the PKK is competitors, other Kurds whom they see as threats to their seizing total power. (The classic historical example of this is the Communist focus on eliminating left-wing competition during the Spanish Civil War, the focus of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.)

Not happy with this, treason from their point of view, the Turks seized Öcalan in Nairobi in 1999, with the help of the CIA, and have imprisoned him ever since, although they don’t seem to forbid him issuing an endless stream of writings and diktats to his followers. This curbed the PKK’s killing spree, and during the past twenty years, Öcalan has changed his tune somewhat. He now pushes a modified, somewhat eccentric, political program, mostly hardcore leftwing with an admixture of libertarianism, and claims he has renounced violence and Communist revolution. Now, the PKK’s propagandists uniformly push the party line—all they want is the creation of a “peaceful, egalitarian society,” to be formed in “democratic Kurdistan.” Maybe it’s even true that’s what they want, though I suspect their definition of such a democracy in practice is the same as all Communists—one man, one vote, once, under the guns of the PKK.

From what I can tell, there are many Kurdish political parties, which are organized not as parties of Kurdistan, which after all does not exist, but as parties in the countries that actually rule in that area. Thus, there is the Democratic Union Party (Syria); the Kurdish National Council (Syria); the People’s Democratic Party (Turkey); the Kurdish Free Life Party (Iran); and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (Iraq, whose armed wing is the Peshmerga who received significant Western press coverage during the Iraq War). When Cudi uses the term “Kurdish resistance movement,” though, he means the PKK. He never once acknowledges that any other entity could represent the Kurdish people, and you won’t learn that any Kurdish party but the PKK exists from reading this book.

However, what seems to bind almost all Kurdish political groups together, other than Kurdish affinity, is an extreme left-wing bent. The PKK is just the most extreme, or perhaps the most successful. Why this should be mystifies me. Most Kurds are Muslim, but religion seems to be of little importance to them, and many of the parties, or at least the leaders within them, not least Apo himself, are avowed atheists (as is Cudi). As to the PKK’s ideology, Cudi only gives vague descriptions of it, although interestingly, aspects of the “education” process in militia camps, as he describes it, bear an odd resemblance to the hierarchical gnosticism of Scientology. The result of this education is the ideological sloganeering of the most risible sort that is sprinkled throughout this book. “The reason the Middle East was beset by continual war and crisis, we argued, was because it lacked an example of a peaceful, stable, free and fair society.” “At the core of our philosophy was the conviction that all tribalism, injustice and inequality stemmed from an original act of oppression when man, the hunter-gatherer, abused his brute strength to violently subjugate his equal partner, woman.” “Completing [Öcalan’s] journey required private profit to be replaced with social profit. In practice, that meant embracing almost all forms of progressiveness, from organic agriculture to feminism to municipal decentralisation.” You can just picture this guy sitting in a Brooklyn Starbucks, trying to pick up women with his slick lines.

Cudi (assuming such a person really exists) is an Iranian Kurd, who fled Iran, deserting the army, in 2004. He snuck illegally into England, which instead of expelling him, welcomed him with open arms, and gave him “asylum” (from what is unclear), money and a job (after he first took an illegal job, in his first act of gratitude toward England). He lived in Leeds, in Yorkshire, where many Middle Eastern invaders live, and took the name “Darren,” while marveling at the cleanliness and organization of England compared to his homeland, which perhaps should give him a clue as to their relative merits. But he, in the manner of many such aliens, was dissatisfied and at loose ends—until another convert introduced him to the ideology of the PKK, which he adopted as his religion. Within a few years, he made his way to Turkey, eager to join the fight for PKK power, arriving in 2013. (All the borders in this area seem to be very porous, since Cudi and many others go back and forth over them.)

He fought in “Rojava,” a region in northern Syria carved out by various allied groups, including the Kurds, early in the current Syrian civil war. Rojava is the name the Kurds give it, wishfully claiming it is “autonomous and democratic,” although I’m pretty sure there haven’t been any elections, and each group in the area is only as autonomous as the range of its rifles. Bashar al-Assad doesn’t use the name, I’m certain, unless he spits while he does it, and no country recognizes such an entity, even if Cudi again doesn’t bother to mention that, or the many non-Kurds who live there. The wars in northern Syria, from my limited understanding of them, are primarily among groups seeking to detach the area from Syria. The Kurds are only one of those; their major opposition, other than the Syrian government, is Sunni groups such as ISIS. Behind and around this are other contests such as the Turks desiring to harm the Syrians, but not benefit the Kurds, and the Russians wanting to support the Syrians. A kaleidoscopic array of militias with shifting loyalties and alliances has arisen as a result of the Syrian war, and there are other occasional players, such as the Israelis, along with the United States supporting various groups at various times. The battles in northern Syria are all attempts at control with the assumption the Syrians will not simply take back the land themselves. It’s a gruesome mess, though as far as the Syrian war goes, my impression is that the least bad of the lot is Assad, but he has the worst propaganda operation.

The book centers around the Battle of Kobani, a real battle, lasting four months from late 2014 to early 2015, in which Cudi says he took part. (Cudi notes that Kobani is fairly close to Haran, the home of Abraham, to hook the American reader into recognition.) But passages that result in reader skepticism show up in the very first chapter, which describes Cudi’s last battle, before he was taken out of the line. Cudi was assigned to lead a small team to take an enemy-occupied hill, and gives a first-person, blow-by-blow account. In the second sentence of the book, we are told that a Kurdish saying is “the tree of freedom is watered with blood.” Maybe, but much more likely a ghostwriter stole that from Thomas Jefferson, knowing that an American audience would lap up this apparent resonance with American history. Then we are told that the Kurds have inhabited this land for fifteen thousand years, which is a gross exaggeration, though to be sure they have been there a long time—or at least some people with some common ancestry have been there, and really, if the PKK is as egalitarian as they claim, why the emphasis on Kurdish nationalism?

But those are minor hiccups. It is the military inaccuracy that is truly jarring, throughout the book. Cudi was the sniper in this engagement. He says he used an M16. This is unlikely; the M16 is not accurate enough or long-distance enough to be a true sniper rifle, although in competent hands it can be quite accurate. The same platform (Eugene Stoner’s AR platform) is sometimes used by designated marksman (technically not a “sniper,” but no matter), but only in customized, accurized versions. Cudi says he used a “night scope”—and then alternates between calling it that, and a “thermal,” which are very different things, and moreover, the vast majority of long-range military night scopes (and thermals) today are mounted separately from a day-vision scope, not combined units. Then he tells the reader that 550 meters “is close range for a sniper.” Not with the 5.56 cartridge he was using; at that distance, the bullet would have dropped five feet, and its kinetic energy would be quite low. Again, not technically impossible, but not typical, especially at night, and not desirable. Then he says “The stock punched my shoulder” when he shot. This cartridge and platform has essentially no felt recoil. After that he had a “jam,” whereupon he took out a cleaning rod and “pushed the bullet out.” Although there are malfunctions that involve bullets stuck in the barrel, they are extremely rare in factory-loaded ammunition. The usual jam involves removing a stuck or improperly-positioned cartridge from the chamber—but that does not require the cleaning rod, since the cartridge can easily be reached directly by reaching into the chamber, or extracted by simply yanking the charging handle. This apparently not having fixed the problem, Cudi says he took the gun apart during the middle of a battle. There are much better ways to address basic jams, and moreover, he incorrectly describes the assembly-reassembly procedure, suggesting he’s never really done it. Then, somehow, he realizes the magazine spring is defective, and “wasn’t pushing cartridges into the breech.” If that’s true, why did he push a bullet out of the barrel? None of this makes any sense—but it seems exciting to an American liberal who’s played Call of Duty and is eager to believe that the Kurds are helping establish a new government that Hillary Clinton would love, which is the story Cudi, or rather the PKK, is peddling here.

The rest of the book alternates Cudi’s claimed life story with sniper episodes from the Battle of Kobani. (We never get . . . . [Review completes as first comment.]

[Charles Haywood · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book appears, to the casual reader, to be propaganda designed to persuade a Great Power, the United States, to aid the Kurdish fight for independence. Like all good wartime propaganda, it grabs the reader’s attention and tugs at his heartstrings. But it’s double propaganda, cleverly done, because beneath the top layer of propaganda is another, artfully concealed. The goal of that second layer is to sell to Americans the Kurdish People’s Party (PKK), a crypto-Maoist combination of political party and war machine. And it’s the PKK, and more broadly the politics surrounding so-called Kurdistan, that I want to explore today.

I have no dog in this fight. I have no relatives or friends from anywhere close to the traditional lands of the Kurds; nor do I have any love for any of the traditional enemies of the Kurds, especially the Turks. It’d be just fine by me if Vladimir Putin defeated the Turks, reconquered Constantinople and crowned himself Emperor of Rome. Let’s not forget that the Russians nearly conquered Constantinople in World War I; more’s the pity they didn’t. Without any axe to grind, I’m a pretty objective observer of the Kurds—although, it’s important to note, like all Middle Eastern matters, the politics of the area are hugely complicated, and no doubt I have missed some subtleties. But I’m pretty sure I got the basics right.

What the Kurds call Kurdistan, though such a country has never existed, is a largely mountainous land comprising parts of northern Syria, southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, and northern Iraq. The Anglosphere has long admired the Kurds. Saladin was a Kurd, and back in the days of Sir Walter Scott, when he wrote The Talisman, the English were only too happy to believe in the nobility of the Muslim warriors who fought the papist Crusaders. More recently, the English encouraged the Kurds to rebel against their Turkish overlords during World War I, fomenting chaos to benefit the British Empire. And America has repeatedly encouraged the Kurds to the same end. That said, the Kurds are not our friends. Among other things, in modern times they eagerly cooperated with the Turks in the Armenian Genocide, and just because the various tinpot dictators around them sometimes treat them badly doesn’t mean we have anything in common with them. No doubt the desire to change this common-sense conclusion is what drove the publication of this book.

The Kurds today very often get positive press in English-speaking media. Of course, that suggests an ability to manipulate Western public opinion, which should perhaps have been a warning that all is not as it seems. After reading this book, I’m pretty sure that most of the exciting war stories in this book are primarily fiction, or exaggerations, in service of one overriding goal: to convince liberal Western readers that the cult-of-personality Communist ideology behind the PKK, created by one Abdullah Öcalan, whom his followers call Apo, is just like Western liberal democracy. To this end we are sold a story whose core premise is that PKK militias were the only important fighting force in the defeat of ISIS, which they did in order to become more like America, or more accurately, more like progressive America, say San Francisco. Needless to say, Donald Trump gets no credit for defeating ISIS, nor do the Russians, or anyone else, get credit for helping. The message of the supposed author of Long Shot, the pseudonymous Azad Cudi, is simple: given that the PKK’s fighters laid down their lives for us; the least we can do is give them Kurdistan, along with sole control over it. They’ll take good care of it. Promise.

So what is the PKK? If you listen to Cudi, it’s more or less like the left-wing of the Democratic Party. In reality, the PKK was organized in 1978, as a stock Maoist party dedicated to violent revolution. (Öcalan was a big fan of Stalin, as well—why limit yourself to admiring just one genocidal dictator?) The PKK is the political end; it is backed by two separate militias, one for men and one for women (of which more later), the YPG and the YPJ. The PKK was born in violence, primarily directed at Turkey, so it is no surprise that both the European Union and the United States have listed the PKK as a terrorist organization for decades. For many years it has engaged in low-level shootings and bombings in and around Kurdistan, using, among other means, suicide bombers. It has also killed many other Kurds who refused to bow to the PKK, including women and children; as with all Communist groups, a prime elimination target of the PKK is competitors, other Kurds whom they see as threats to their seizing total power. (The classic historical example of this is the Communist focus on eliminating left-wing competition during the Spanish Civil War, the focus of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.)

Not happy with this, treason from their point of view, the Turks seized Öcalan in Nairobi in 1999, with the help of the CIA, and have imprisoned him ever since, although they don’t seem to forbid him issuing an endless stream of writings and diktats to his followers. This curbed the PKK’s killing spree, and during the past twenty years, Öcalan has changed his tune somewhat. He now pushes a modified, somewhat eccentric, political program, mostly hardcore leftwing with an admixture of libertarianism, and claims he has renounced violence and Communist revolution. Now, the PKK’s propagandists uniformly push the party line—all they want is the creation of a “peaceful, egalitarian society,” to be formed in “democratic Kurdistan.” Maybe it’s even true that’s what they want, though I suspect their definition of such a democracy in practice is the same as all Communists—one man, one vote, once, under the guns of the PKK.

From what I can tell, there are many Kurdish political parties, which are organized not as parties of Kurdistan, which after all does not exist, but as parties in the countries that actually rule in that area. Thus, there is the Democratic Union Party (Syria); the Kurdish National Council (Syria); the People’s Democratic Party (Turkey); the Kurdish Free Life Party (Iran); and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (Iraq, whose armed wing is the Peshmerga who received significant Western press coverage during the Iraq War). When Cudi uses the term “Kurdish resistance movement,” though, he means the PKK. He never once acknowledges that any other entity could represent the Kurdish people, and you won’t learn that any Kurdish party but the PKK exists from reading this book.

However, what seems to bind almost all Kurdish political groups together, other than Kurdish affinity, is an extreme left-wing bent. The PKK is just the most extreme, or perhaps the most successful. Why this should be mystifies me. Most Kurds are Muslim, but religion seems to be of little importance to them, and many of the parties, or at least the leaders within them, not least Apo himself, are avowed atheists (as is Cudi). As to the PKK’s ideology, Cudi only gives vague descriptions of it, although interestingly, aspects of the “education” process in militia camps, as he describes it, bear an odd resemblance to the hierarchical gnosticism of Scientology. The result of this education is the ideological sloganeering of the most risible sort that is sprinkled throughout this book. “The reason the Middle East was beset by continual war and crisis, we argued, was because it lacked an example of a peaceful, stable, free and fair society.” “At the core of our philosophy was the conviction that all tribalism, injustice and inequality stemmed from an original act of oppression when man, the hunter-gatherer, abused his brute strength to violently subjugate his equal partner, woman.” “Completing [Öcalan’s] journey required private profit to be replaced with social profit. In practice, that meant embracing almost all forms of progressiveness, from organic agriculture to feminism to municipal decentralisation.” You can just picture this guy sitting in a Brooklyn Starbucks, trying to pick up women with his slick lines.

Cudi (assuming such a person really exists) is an Iranian Kurd, who fled Iran, deserting the army, in 2004. He snuck illegally into England, which instead of expelling him, welcomed him with open arms, and gave him “asylum” (from what is unclear), money and a job (after he first took an illegal job, in his first act of gratitude toward England). He lived in Leeds, in Yorkshire, where many Middle Eastern invaders live, and took the name “Darren,” while marveling at the cleanliness and organization of England compared to his homeland, which perhaps should give him a clue as to their relative merits. But he, in the manner of many such aliens, was dissatisfied and at loose ends—until another convert introduced him to the ideology of the PKK, which he adopted as his religion. Within a few years, he made his way to Turkey, eager to join the fight for PKK power, arriving in 2013. (All the borders in this area seem to be very porous, since Cudi and many others go back and forth over them.)

He fought in “Rojava,” a region in northern Syria carved out by various allied groups, including the Kurds, early in the current Syrian civil war. Rojava is the name the Kurds give it, wishfully claiming it is “autonomous and democratic,” although I’m pretty sure there haven’t been any elections, and each group in the area is only as autonomous as the range of its rifles. Bashar al-Assad doesn’t use the name, I’m certain, unless he spits while he does it, and no country recognizes such an entity, even if Cudi again doesn’t bother to mention that, or the many non-Kurds who live there. The wars in northern Syria, from my limited understanding of them, are primarily among groups seeking to detach the area from Syria. The Kurds are only one of those; their major opposition, other than the Syrian government, is Sunni groups such as ISIS. Behind and around this are other contests such as the Turks desiring to harm the Syrians, but not benefit the Kurds, and the Russians wanting to support the Syrians. A kaleidoscopic array of militias with shifting loyalties and alliances has arisen as a result of the Syrian war, and there are other occasional players, such as the Israelis, along with the United States supporting various groups at various times. The battles in northern Syria are all attempts at control with the assumption the Syrians will not simply take back the land themselves. It’s a gruesome mess, though as far as the Syrian war goes, my impression is that the least bad of the lot is Assad, but he has the worst propaganda operation.

The book centers around the Battle of Kobani, a real battle, lasting four months from late 2014 to early 2015, in which Cudi says he took part. (Cudi notes that Kobani is fairly close to Haran, the home of Abraham, to hook the American reader into recognition.) But passages that result in reader skepticism show up in the very first chapter, which describes Cudi’s last battle, before he was taken out of the line. Cudi was assigned to lead a small team to take an enemy-occupied hill, and gives a first-person, blow-by-blow account. In the second sentence of the book, we are told that a Kurdish saying is “the tree of freedom is watered with blood.” Maybe, but much more likely a ghostwriter stole that from Thomas Jefferson, knowing that an American audience would lap up this apparent resonance with American history. Then we are told that the Kurds have inhabited this land for fifteen thousand years, which is a gross exaggeration, though to be sure they have been there a long time—or at least some people with some common ancestry have been there, and really, if the PKK is as egalitarian as they claim, why the emphasis on Kurdish nationalism?

But those are minor hiccups. It is the military inaccuracy that is truly jarring, throughout the book. Cudi was the sniper in this engagement. He says he used an M16. This is unlikely; the M16 is not accurate enough or long-distance enough to be a true sniper rifle, although in competent hands it can be quite accurate. The same platform (Eugene Stoner’s AR platform) is sometimes used by designated marksman (technically not a “sniper,” but no matter), but only in customized, accurized versions. Cudi says he used a “night scope”—and then alternates between calling it that, and a “thermal,” which are very different things, and moreover, the vast majority of long-range military night scopes (and thermals) today are mounted separately from a day-vision scope, not combined units. Then he tells the reader that 550 meters “is close range for a sniper.” Not with the 5.56 cartridge he was using; at that distance, the bullet would have dropped five feet, and its kinetic energy would be quite low. Again, not technically impossible, but not typical, especially at night, and not desirable. Then he says “The stock punched my shoulder” when he shot. This cartridge and platform has essentially no felt recoil. After that he had a “jam,” whereupon he took out a cleaning rod and “pushed the bullet out.” Although there are malfunctions that involve bullets stuck in the barrel, they are extremely rare in factory-loaded ammunition. The usual jam involves removing a stuck or improperly-positioned cartridge from the chamber—but that does not require the cleaning rod, since the cartridge can easily be reached directly by reaching into the chamber, or extracted by simply yanking the charging handle. This apparently not having fixed the problem, Cudi says he took the gun apart during the middle of a battle. There are much better ways to address basic jams, and moreover, he incorrectly describes the assembly-reassembly procedure, suggesting he’s never really done it. Then, somehow, he realizes the magazine spring is defective, and “wasn’t pushing cartridges into the breech.” If that’s true, why did he push a bullet out of the barrel? None of this makes any sense—but it seems exciting to an American liberal who’s played Call of Duty and is eager to believe that the Kurds are helping establish a new government that Hillary Clinton would love, which is the story Cudi, or rather the PKK, is peddling here.

The rest of the book alternates Cudi’s claimed life story with sniper episodes from the Battle of Kobani. (We never get . . . . [Review completes as first comment.]

[Charles Haywood · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book appears, to the casual reader, to be propaganda designed to persuade a Great Power, the United States, to aid the Kurdish fight for independence. Like all good wartime propaganda, it grabs the reader’s attention and tugs at his heartstrings. But it’s double propaganda, cleverly done, because beneath the top layer of propaganda is another, artfully concealed. The goal of that second layer is to sell to Americans the Kurdish People’s Party (PKK), a crypto-Maoist combination of political party and war machine. And it’s the PKK, and more broadly the politics surrounding so-called Kurdistan, that I want to explore today.

I have no dog in this fight. I have no relatives or friends from anywhere close to the traditional lands of the Kurds; nor do I have any love for any of the traditional enemies of the Kurds, especially the Turks. It’d be just fine by me if Vladimir Putin defeated the Turks, reconquered Constantinople and crowned himself Emperor of Rome. Let’s not forget that the Russians nearly conquered Constantinople in World War I; more’s the pity they didn’t. Without any axe to grind, I’m a pretty objective observer of the Kurds—although, it’s important to note, like all Middle Eastern matters, the politics of the area are hugely complicated, and no doubt I have missed some subtleties. But I’m pretty sure I got the basics right.

What the Kurds call Kurdistan, though such a country has never existed, is a largely mountainous land comprising parts of northern Syria, southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, and northern Iraq. The Anglosphere has long admired the Kurds. Saladin was a Kurd, and back in the days of Sir Walter Scott, when he wrote The Talisman, the English were only too happy to believe in the nobility of the Muslim warriors who fought the papist Crusaders. More recently, the English encouraged the Kurds to rebel against their Turkish overlords during World War I, fomenting chaos to benefit the British Empire. And America has repeatedly encouraged the Kurds to the same end. That said, the Kurds are not our friends. Among other things, in modern times they eagerly cooperated with the Turks in the Armenian Genocide, and just because the various tinpot dictators around them sometimes treat them badly doesn’t mean we have anything in common with them. No doubt the desire to change this common-sense conclusion is what drove the publication of this book.

The Kurds today very often get positive press in English-speaking media. Of course, that suggests an ability to manipulate Western public opinion, which should perhaps have been a warning that all is not as it seems. After reading this book, I’m pretty sure that most of the exciting war stories in this book are primarily fiction, or exaggerations, in service of one overriding goal: to convince liberal Western readers that the cult-of-personality Communist ideology behind the PKK, created by one Abdullah Öcalan, whom his followers call Apo, is just like Western liberal democracy. To this end we are sold a story whose core premise is that PKK militias were the only important fighting force in the defeat of ISIS, which they did in order to become more like America, or more accurately, more like progressive America, say San Francisco. Needless to say, Donald Trump gets no credit for defeating ISIS, nor do the Russians, or anyone else, get credit for helping. The message of the supposed author of Long Shot, the pseudonymous Azad Cudi, is simple: given that the PKK’s fighters laid down their lives for us; the least we can do is give them Kurdistan, along with sole control over it. They’ll take good care of it. Promise.

So what is the PKK? If you listen to Cudi, it’s more or less like the left-wing of the Democratic Party. In reality, the PKK was organized in 1978, as a stock Maoist party dedicated to violent revolution. (Öcalan was a big fan of Stalin, as well—why limit yourself to admiring just one genocidal dictator?) The PKK is the political end; it is backed by two separate militias, one for men and one for women (of which more later), the YPG and the YPJ. The PKK was born in violence, primarily directed at Turkey, so it is no surprise that both the European Union and the United States have listed the PKK as a terrorist organization for decades. For many years it has engaged in low-level shootings and bombings in and around Kurdistan, using, among other means, suicide bombers. It has also killed many other Kurds who refused to bow to the PKK, including women and children; as with all Communist groups, a prime elimination target of the PKK is competitors, other Kurds whom they see as threats to their seizing total power. (The classic historical example of this is the Communist focus on eliminating left-wing competition during the Spanish Civil War, the focus of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.)

Not happy with this, treason from their point of view, the Turks seized Öcalan in Nairobi in 1999, with the help of the CIA, and have imprisoned him ever since, although they don’t seem to forbid him issuing an endless stream of writings and diktats to his followers. This curbed the PKK’s killing spree, and during the past twenty years, Öcalan has changed his tune somewhat. He now pushes a modified, somewhat eccentric, political program, mostly hardcore leftwing with an admixture of libertarianism, and claims he has renounced violence and Communist revolution. Now, the PKK’s propagandists uniformly push the party line—all they want is the creation of a “peaceful, egalitarian society,” to be formed in “democratic Kurdistan.” Maybe it’s even true that’s what they want, though I suspect their definition of such a democracy in practice is the same as all Communists—one man, one vote, once, under the guns of the PKK.

From what I can tell, there are many Kurdish political parties, which are organized not as parties of Kurdistan, which after all does not exist, but as parties in the countries that actually rule in that area. Thus, there is the Democratic Union Party (Syria); the Kurdish National Council (Syria); the People’s Democratic Party (Turkey); the Kurdish Free Life Party (Iran); and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (Iraq, whose armed wing is the Peshmerga who received significant Western press coverage during the Iraq War). When Cudi uses the term “Kurdish resistance movement,” though, he means the PKK. He never once acknowledges that any other entity could represent the Kurdish people, and you won’t learn that any Kurdish party but the PKK exists from reading this book.

However, what seems to bind almost all Kurdish political groups together, other than Kurdish affinity, is an extreme left-wing bent. The PKK is just the most extreme, or perhaps the most successful. Why this should be mystifies me. Most Kurds are Muslim, but religion seems to be of little importance to them, and many of the parties, or at least the leaders within them, not least Apo himself, are avowed atheists (as is Cudi). As to the PKK’s ideology, Cudi only gives vague descriptions of it, although interestingly, aspects of the “education” process in militia camps, as he describes it, bear an odd resemblance to the hierarchical gnosticism of Scientology. The result of this education is the ideological sloganeering of the most risible sort that is sprinkled throughout this book. “The reason the Middle East was beset by continual war and crisis, we argued, was because it lacked an example of a peaceful, stable, free and fair society.” “At the core of our philosophy was the conviction that all tribalism, injustice and inequality stemmed from an original act of oppression when man, the hunter-gatherer, abused his brute strength to violently subjugate his equal partner, woman.” “Completing [Öcalan’s] journey required private profit to be replaced with social profit. In practice, that meant embracing almost all forms of progressiveness, from organic agriculture to feminism to municipal decentralisation.” You can just picture this guy sitting in a Brooklyn Starbucks, trying to pick up women with his slick lines.

Cudi (assuming such a person really exists) is an Iranian Kurd, who fled Iran, deserting the army, in 2004. He snuck illegally into England, which instead of expelling him, welcomed him with open arms, and gave him “asylum” (from what is unclear), money and a job (after he first took an illegal job, in his first act of gratitude toward England). He lived in Leeds, in Yorkshire, where many Middle Eastern invaders live, and took the name “Darren,” while marveling at the cleanliness and organization of England compared to his homeland, which perhaps should give him a clue as to their relative merits. But he, in the manner of many such aliens, was dissatisfied and at loose ends—until another convert introduced him to the ideology of the PKK, which he adopted as his religion. Within a few years, he made his way to Turkey, eager to join the fight for PKK power, arriving in 2013. (All the borders in this area seem to be very porous, since Cudi and many others go back and forth over them.)

He fought in “Rojava,” a region in northern Syria carved out by various allied groups, including the Kurds, early in the current Syrian civil war. Rojava is the name the Kurds give it, wishfully claiming it is “autonomous and democratic,” although I’m pretty sure there haven’t been any elections, and each group in the area is only as autonomous as the range of its rifles. Bashar al-Assad doesn’t use the name, I’m certain, unless he spits while he does it, and no country recognizes such an entity, even if Cudi again doesn’t bother to mention that, or the many non-Kurds who live there. The wars in northern Syria, from my limited understanding of them, are primarily among groups seeking to detach the area from Syria. The Kurds are only one of those; their major opposition, other than the Syrian government, is Sunni groups such as ISIS. Behind and around this are other contests such as the Turks desiring to harm the Syrians, but not benefit the Kurds, and the Russians wanting to support the Syrians. A kaleidoscopic array of militias with shifting loyalties and alliances has arisen as a result of the Syrian war, and there are other occasional players, such as the Israelis, along with the United States supporting various groups at various times. The battles in northern Syria are all attempts at control with the assumption the Syrians will not simply take back the land themselves. It’s a gruesome mess, though as far as the Syrian war goes, my impression is that the least bad of the lot is Assad, but he has the worst propaganda operation.

The book centers around the Battle of Kobani, a real battle, lasting four months from late 2014 to early 2015, in which Cudi says he took part. (Cudi notes that Kobani is fairly close to Haran, the home of Abraham, to hook the American reader into recognition.) But passages that result in reader skepticism show up in the very first chapter, which describes Cudi’s last battle, before he was taken out of the line. Cudi was assigned to lead a small team to take an enemy-occupied hill, and gives a first-person, blow-by-blow account. In the second sentence of the book, we are told that a Kurdish saying is “the tree of freedom is watered with blood.” Maybe, but much more likely a ghostwriter stole that from Thomas Jefferson, knowing that an American audience would lap up this apparent resonance with American history. Then we are told that the Kurds have inhabited this land for fifteen thousand years, which is a gross exaggeration, though to be sure they have been there a long time—or at least some people with some common ancestry have been there, and really, if the PKK is as egalitarian as they claim, why the emphasis on Kurdish nationalism?

But those are minor hiccups. It is the military inaccuracy that is truly jarring, throughout the book. Cudi was the sniper in this engagement. He says he used an M16. This is unlikely; the M16 is not accurate enough or long-distance enough to be a true sniper rifle, although in competent hands it can be quite accurate. The same platform (Eugene Stoner’s AR platform) is sometimes used by designated marksman (technically not a “sniper,” but no matter), but only in customized, accurized versions. Cudi says he used a “night scope”—and then alternates between calling it that, and a “thermal,” which are very different things, and moreover, the vast majority of long-range military night scopes (and thermals) today are mounted separately from a day-vision scope, not combined units. Then he tells the reader that 550 meters “is close range for a sniper.” Not with the 5.56 cartridge he was using; at that distance, the bullet would have dropped five feet, and its kinetic energy would be quite low. Again, not technically impossible, but not typical, especially at night, and not desirable. Then he says “The stock punched my shoulder” when he shot. This cartridge and platform has essentially no felt recoil. After that he had a “jam,” whereupon he took out a cleaning rod and “pushed the bullet out.” Although there are malfunctions that involve bullets stuck in the barrel, they are extremely rare in factory-loaded ammunition. The usual jam involves removing a stuck or improperly-positioned cartridge from the chamber—but that does not require the cleaning rod, since the cartridge can easily be reached directly by reaching into the chamber, or extracted by simply yanking the charging handle. This apparently not having fixed the problem, Cudi says he took the gun apart during the middle of a battle. There are much better ways to address basic jams, and moreover, he incorrectly describes the assembly-reassembly procedure, suggesting he’s never really done it. Then, somehow, he realizes the magazine spring is defective, and “wasn’t pushing cartridges into the breech.” If that’s true, why did he push a bullet out of the barrel? None of this makes any sense—but it seems exciting to an American liberal who’s played Call of Duty and is eager to believe that the Kurds are helping establish a new government that Hillary Clinton would love, which is the story Cudi, or rather the PKK, is peddling here.

The rest of the book alternates Cudi’s claimed life story with sniper episodes from the Battle of Kobani. (We never get . . . . [Review completes as first comment.]

[Nigel Kotani · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book tells the story of the author, a Kurd, fleeing Iran, being smuggled to the UK, settling here as a refugee for over a decade and finally returning to Kurdistan to fight ISIS as a sniper, the last of which elements fills the great majority of the book. The chronology jumps around a bit, with one jump leaving me confused for a while as to what had happened - literally the only negative thing I have to say about the book - but the jumps in chronology work from a dramatic perspective.

It is a remarkable story, particularly the sections dealing with the defense of Kobani, which reminded me strongly of Anthony Beevor's 'Stalingrad', but told from first hand experience. I don't believe I've ever read as good a first-hand description of war (not that it's a genre in which I've immersed myself). One particular section where he describes his thought process in encountering a cairn which he believes might be booby-trapped was a fascinating insight into something with which most of us are entirely unfamiliar, namely the strategy of soldiering at infantry level (and I would have been happy for the book to contain a lot more of that type of writing).

The Kurdish forces were organised on unusually egalitarian lines, with commanders issuing 'recommendations' rather than orders, no ranks, and men and women having equal status. Indeed, somewhat unexpectedly for a war book, on several occasions the book becomes a passionate advocate for libertarianism and, specifically, feminism.

What takes this book from merely being excellent and into the realms of jaw-dropping is the fact that it doesn't appear to have been ghost-written, that the author spoke no English until he came to the UK aged (I think) 20, that it was written in English and that it is very, very well written. Take this as an example: "That was the nature of war: a succession of catastrophes that battered your capacity for endurance, then killed you or broke you or, if you survived, rewarded you with pain or guilt. This was the destiny of all of us the moment we had picked up a gun."

What remains to be seen is whether the author can go on to write as well about subjects not directly related to his personal experience, but I would not be at all surprised if he were to go on to become a full-time writer. I, for one, will be watching this space.