On waiting.

"I fucking love waiting!"

Everybody's wait ends here. No exceptions.

     As much as one would like to believe that time spent in a warzone is a non-stop hail of gunfire, explosions and adrenaline, ninety percent or more of your time is spent waiting. "Hurry up and wait" is the soldier's motto. From Shadadee till the start of Manbij,  most of our time was spent hanging around. We went to Qamishlo and a few other places--we only fought once in Qamishlo--, but our trips to Seluk and back to Qamishlo were basically as a show of force, or as extra security after attacks. We spent months waiting.

     During this time, two more volunteers joined our Tabor, Zinar, a sixty-something world traveler and English teacher who had decided in his autumn years that it was time to experience war.

Note the Grateful Dead Patch. If anybody has this guys contact info, let me know.

     Also joining us was Firaz Kardo (Now Shaheed Firaz), an Egyptian born Kurd with a knack for fixing broken electronics, and a desire to make every space he occupied as luxurious as possible. He installed WIFI and a ceiling fan in our Nokta and insisted on regular trips to Tel Tamar to eat at the Christian restaurant and pick up assorted goodies. I wasn't complaining. He spoke at least five languages, and as a young man joined the Iraqi Communist party to fight Saddam after his father was killed by the regime. Quite the life.

"If we don't do this, WHO WILL?" Miss you, Brother.

     At any rate, for some months, waiting became our lives. Waiting for the Manbij operation, that was to come at any time. We bullshited, argued, made friends with our Kurdish Hevals, cooked food, complained, and generally made the best of things. We went to the local ice cream shop and figured out that sheep ice cream is the best stuff in existence. We watched Band of Brothers on laptop. Good times. Towards the end of May, we noticed American made Chinook helicopters flying low from a Northern meeting area to a southern base on a nightly basis. We were told that American Special Operations Soldiers and higher ups were meeting with YPG officials about the impending Manbij liberation. It wouldn't be long now.

Fighting the Regime in Qamishlo--GoPro footage

     Ok, as promised, I got the Go-Pro footage from my buddy Freeman Stevenson of the fight in Qamishlo, April 22 2016. His Go Pro goes dead about an hour and a half into the fight, so a lot of it isnt seen. Also, Yes, Mormon and Ciwan were aware that twenty minutes of fucking around is far to long for a casevac. We were all a lot more aggressive about first aid after that. Some commanders are better about this than others. For example, when this Tabor, Shaheed Kareem, was pushing through Gunds during the Manbij operation, we had only one fatality, despite several Hevals being shot through the chest. They were given treatment on-site and moved out quickly. I've seen several of them since then, and they're on the mend; Including Heval Aria, from this video. As I've said in the previous post, with enough smart and good natured idealists like Heval Aria, this whole social project will be for something. Anyway, I go into more detail in the previous post, 'War is a Drug, Part Six: Qamishlo.'  More to come.


Note to Roy Gutman, of The Nation: You're decrepit old ass really thinks that the YPG and the Syrian Regime are Pals? IN THE FUTURE there will probably have to be some collusion, to get the country out of its cycle of rubble production and corpse manufacture. It's just the way it's going to have to be. But I assure you, there is no love lost between the SAA and the YPG, let alone a clandestine partnership. You think the SAA and the YPG regularly kill one another to hide the conspiracy, or some such tin-foil hat fuckery? Get the fuck out of Istanbul and out of the pocket of KRG and MIT handlers. Go take a tour of Nusaybin, or any number of Kurdish cities demolished and massacred by the Turkish State. Talk to people outside of a managed environment. Be a journalist, not a hitman.