Ten Years After Its Liberation From ISIS, Kobane Fights a New Existential War

As the first morning light falls on the northern Syrian town Kobane, the almost absolute silence of the night is shattered by a violent rattling and rumbling of frosty engines. Revving up with poor quality petrol, hundreds of lawnmower-sized electricity generators add their unique hums to the mix, steadily taking over the town’s soundscape and filling its center with intoxicating fumes. With this ensemble of portable dynamos, Kobane is ready to resist a new day without central electricity.

For the past two months, the Kurdish bordertown of around 100,000 people has taken the heaviest brunt of renewed fighting between the Turkish-led Syrian National Army (SNA) and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) on the Euphrates river crossing points some 50 kilometers to the south. While weapons were largely lowered across the war-torn country with the fall of the Assads’ regime in early December, Turkey launched the fiercest assault in five years against the self-governing region of the Democratic Autonomous Administration of Northern and Eastern Syria (DAANES), home to the country’s Kurdish minority.

On December 10, 2024, Turkish air strikes rendered the Euphrates region’s vital hydroelectric station in Tishreen out of service, depriving the whole region of electricity. According to UNICEF, over 400,000 people were immediately impacted, with roughly one third of them in Kobane and its satellite villages. Going well into its third month without power, diesel-run electricity generators—the oldest of them clearly from the Cold War era—now keep the town on its feet.

“There is no electricity and no water,” said a resident Riyad Mustafa, 43, noting that the loss of electricity from the Tishreen Dam shut down the town’s water stations as well. Foodstuffs are slowly getting scarcer and bottled water is unaffordable for many, including himself. While lamenting that diseases have started to spread especially among the children due to people resorting to improvised wells for drinking water, he has no plans of leaving his home town despite the escalating humanitarian crisis.

Riyad works normally as a cleaner, but in the past days he has been on an extraordinary undertaking. With a couple of youngsters from the neighboring apartments, he has taken to digging a bomb shelter in front of his house, removing the pavement and going at least fifteen meters down into the clayey soil. 

“We defend ourselves from the airplanes,” said Bangîn Ibrahim, Riyad’s 21-year-old fellow digger, visibly proud of their excavation in the middle of the street. While the fighting has not reached the city, Riyad has already lost his cousin to a Turkish airstrike in nearby Bowan village some fifteen kilometers away. The strike pushed the surviving relatives to seek refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan.

If it wasn’t for the pervasive rumble of electricity generators, one would hear Turkish drones and jets patrolling overhead and their missiles landing in the town’s southern countryside. According to local security officials, on a regular day, between five and seven armed drones hover over Kobane and its countryside. Although they usually do not strike inside the town itself, a lethal threat is always present: on January 29, a woman and her guest were killed in Kobane’s city center when a guided missile struck her living room literally out of the blue.

“In the south, they have burned everything,” said an officer of the town’s internal security forces, or Asayish, who identified himself with his call sign Musa. Since the fall of Assad, Turkish airstrikes have destroyed a school, an olive oil press, gsm antennas, and water and electricity stations, alongside other civilian infrastructure in Kobane’s surroundings.

According to Rojava Information Center (RIC) which documents drone activity in northern Syria, at least 103 civilians have lost their lives in precision air strikes since the start of December—many of them in the Euphrates region that Kobane is part of. The invisible but endemic threat from the skies keeps the population constantly at alarm.

Although Musa is not aware of the ongoing excavation effort just a couple of blocks away from the town’s main street, he said seeking safety underground is natural for civilians when bombs start to fall, citing Vietnam and Iraq wars as examples of widespread migration into tunnels and shelters.

“If an attack comes to Kobane, where are people supposed to go? Where, if not underground?” he pondered out loud, letting a subtle tone of frustration slip through his otherwise composed expression.

With successive invasions in 2016 and 2019, the Turkish military and its Syrian proxy forces have surrounded Kobane from three directions, leaving the bordertown at the tip of a 50-kilometer-deep northward salient. There is only one road left for people and goods to move in and out of the semi-besieged city, passing dangerously close—just some hundreds of meters away—to the current front lines. According to Musa, Turkey’s objective with the latest onslaught is to lay a complete siege on the city and starve the defiant people of Kobane into capitulation.

The surprise offensive of the al-Qaeda splinter group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) which led to the rapid collapse of the Assad regime has put life in Kobane in disarray. In the year leading up to the ouster of the Assad regime, the Turkish government was increasingly signalling rapprochement with Damascus, presumably with the aim of trading some of the Turkish-controlled parts of Syria for a renewed offensive against the DAANES region. The closed-door negotiations set off protests in Northern-Eastern Syria as well as in the HTS-ruled, Turkish-protected Idlib governorate with civilians outraged that they would be sold out by one dictator to another.

Analysts were predicting renewed regime and Turkish offensives in the north of the country, and Erdogan’s government started deporting Syrians to Idlib and other dangerous parts in conjunction with recurring waves of anti-Syrian racism and pogroms in Turkey. However, with the HTS-led “Deterrence of Aggression” operation on November 27, all the calculations were redrawn, including for Kobane which—like other Kurdish-majority regions in the north—had prepared for a potential attack to come from across the Turkish border.

On the sidelines of the HTS-led offensive against Assad’s forces, the Turkish proxy formations in Syria launched an assault against the DAANES, wresting the city of Manbij and the region of Shehba from the Syrian Democratic Forces and displacing more than 100,000 Kurds to the east of Euphrates. While the fight was soon contained on the Euphrates river, which now acts as a demarcation line between the two forces, the changes in the political geography pose a whacking challenge for Kobane.

“Throughout the fourteen years of war we have always had medicines, but every time there is renewed fighting, they get scarcer,” said Omar Yousuf, 55, who runs a pharmacy on Kobane’s main street. According to him, the loss of Manbij to Turkish control dried up the supply of European import medicines, including life-saving insulin and thyroid medicines. 

“Insulin is a big problem now,” he said, pointing his finger at a shelf with a visible vacuum on the place where one would normally find the diabetes medicine.

Typical of conflict zones, the economy of Kobane is dependent on black markets and vast smuggling networks even for basic supplies and necessities. Due to the crimes of the Assad regime, Syria remains the world’s third most heavily sanctioned country which severely restricts the flow of goods in and out. European medicines used to arrive mainly through Turkey to Idlib and trickle from there to other parts of Syria. Despite the country being split in several zones controlled by hostile factions of the civil war, all-encompassing black markets have kept all regions supplied to varying degrees. However, every time the front lines move, smuggling routes adapt to the new map of territorial control.

With the fall of Manbij to pro-Turkish forces, Kobane lost its principal trade route to Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city and the main center of commerce. The supply runs which used to take some two and half hours through Manbij now demand up to six or seven hours through Tabqa further south. While movement between the self-governing and the former regime areas has reportedly eased with the new authorities in Damascus, the extra hours on the road take their toll on the material foundations of life in Kobane.

“Even water is a big problem now,” said Omar. He said water-borne diseases are increasing rapidly, and medicines for intestinal diseases are running low. However, he admits himself drinking well water following the supply cut of drinking water from the Euphrates.

Zozan Khelil, the co-chair of the Euphrates Region’s Drinking Water Department, says their department tries to do everything it can to restore access to clean water but struggles with the same logistical problems as Yosuf and the town’s merchants. While the Tishreen Dam remains out of service, the town’s emergency supply is disrupted as well. The department hoped to repair all the four diesel generators of the emergency pump, out of which only one was functional at the time of the Tishreen blackout. However, spare parts and industrial grade machines are scarcely available and stretch the department’s current budget. According to their estimate, the standard cost of $20,000 per generator in Turkey would rise in the range of $50,000 in Kobane due to the long chain of smugglers involved in their procurement.

“This small piece is five dollars in Turkey, but for us it costs twenty,” said Mexran Bosî, Khelil’s co-chair at the department, showing a small hydrometer in his hands to illustrate the coercive prices on the black markets. Every household needs one of these gadgets to track their water consumption.

The sliver of hope that the department had for renewing the broken generators was, however, crushed on February 2 when Turkish airstrikes wreaked havoc at the only remaining water station. Even if one generator did not generate enough pressure to pump the water up into the apartments, it still brought it inside the city perimeter from where it was taken in tanker trucks to the inhabitants. Now, the city is forced to find new ad hoc solutions.

“The pumps, the generators, everything is lost. The water of Kobane and its surrounding villages is completely gone,” Khelil said over Whatsapp the day after the strike. “Life is really hard and, on top of that, it is now winter time and people are catching cold. It is very difficult now in Kobane.”

Combined with the looming siege, the gradual decimation of vital civilian infrastructure by Turkish airstrikes has pushed Kobane into a struggle for survival. Townspeople from all walks of life describe the current phase of fighting as an existential war, a question of existence and non-existence for the town and its Kurdish identity. Citing poor human rights record in other Turkish-occupied parts of Syria, the inhabitants fear a Turkish-led invasion would lead to a demographic change also in Kobane. Many have personally endured the threat of ethnic cleansing when the Islamic State (ISIS) besieged the city ten years earlier and, hardened by a decade of war, they are determined to defend their city once again.

While some wealthiest personalities have reportedly escaped the tightening encirclement, the vast majority of Kobane’s inhabitants are refusing to leave. Despite losing energy and water, businesses continue to function with portable generators and the city center remains full of life in daytime. For many, migration is an overwhelming financial stretch. For many others, staying put and resisting is a question of principle, even if it means digging in and moving the whole town underground.

“If Kobane falls, nothing in the name of Rojava remains,” said Musa, using the Kurdish name for the northern, predominantly Kurdish regions of Syria. The Syrian borderlands with Turkey are populated by more than two million Kurds, Syria’s largest ethnic minority which has faced decades of state repression. Under the Assads’ rule, Kurdish language and cultural festivities were strictly banned, and many did not even have citizenship and the few civil rights—such as right to property—that the regime allowed for the Arab majority. For them, the Syrian Civil War changed everything.

On July 19, 2012, it was the people of Kobane who first expelled the Assad regime troops and officials from their town, kicking off what became known as the Rojava Revolution. In the following years, the small enclaves of self-governance developed into a multiethnic Democratic Autonomous Administration of Northern and Eastern Syria (DAANES), a confederation of municipalities whose Social Contract guaranteed, among other things, a democratic civilian administration, full and equal participation of women in all social (and military) affairs, as well as cultural and linguistic rights for the Kurds and other smaller minorities of the region. The DAANES now encompasses all areas east of Euphrates.

Moreover, in 2014, Kobane gained worldwide attention and sympathy as the People’s and Women’s Protection Units (YPG and YPJ) defeated an ISIS onslaught against the city, and pushed the Islamist group into retreat. After the fall of major cities like Mosul and Raqqa into the hands of the Islamists, Kobane succeeding—eventually with the help of the US Air Force—in pushing back the ISIS made the town a legendary symbol of resistance, ingrained in countless songs, street paintings, and statues across the region.

After thirteen years of war, in Kobane, it is hard to find families who do not have portraits of YPG or YPJ martyrs on the walls of their homes or dangling from their rear view mirrors. The harrowing street-by-street defense against ISIS in 2014 left 70% of the town in ruins, more than half of the population displaced, and the town’s two Martyrs Cemeteries with rows of hundreds of graves. Everyone in the town has rebuilt their houses and lives literally from scratch, and leaving the city after all the sacrifices and achievements is off the table.

“With the revolution, so many things have changed, especially for the women,” said Peyman Alosh, the coordinator of Kongra Star women’s movement in Kobane. While the adult demography of the war-torn city and its streets appears visibly women majority, it was largely Kongra Star’s economic, educational, and organizational initiatives—alongside the Women’s Protection Units’ (YPJ) trailblazing armed struggle—that empowered women to assume a leading role in the social reconstruction that followed the eight-month ISIS siege.

“Our war was not only physical, but mental warfare. In society and in the families, we fought against the old regime mentality that [the Assads] imposed on our society,” Alosh said. While its origins lay in the Kurdish national liberation struggle, the proponents of the Rojava Revolution articulate it most of all as women’s revolution with radical changes in gender relations throughout the region where women used to be largely confined to the domestic sphere during the regime.

However, it is once again the very physical war that weighs down Alosh. As Kobane celebrated the tenth anniversary of its liberation from ISIS, for her, like many others, the loss of water and electricity eerily reminds of the last months that led to the siege that scarred the city and its people earlier.

There is a looming sense that Kobane’s destiny is tied to the battle now unfolding around the Tishreen Dam and Qaraqozak bridge—the two Euphrates river crossing points whose conquest would enable pro-Turkish forces to launch a pincer movement and close the siege around the town. In December, Kongra Star formed a women’s battalion, and educated their members in defending themselves alongside the Asayish and the Civilian Protection Units (HPC) in case the city was attacked. However, Alosh iterates that civilians picking up weapons is only the last resort.

“Revolutionary people’s war does not mean that everyone picks up a gun. It also means not leaving your city. Everyone can do their part in protecting the society, like we see now at the Tishreen Dam,” she said.

Since January 8, thousands of civilians from Kobane and across Northern Syria have headed to the Tishreen Dam to protest the Turkish air strikes which, according to the DAANES administration, threaten its structure. Besides the loss of electricity in the region, a potential collapse of the dam risks severely disrupting the Euphrates’ ecosystem, with the impact allegedly reverberating downstream all the way until Iraq.

What started as a spontaneous protest has grown in resolve after Turkish drones bombed the first convoy on January 8, leaving three civilians dead and several others wounded. The protest action has turned into a semi-permanent encampment, now well into its second month. All main population centers of the region, including Kobane, Qamishlo, Heseke, and Raqqa, have mobilized convoys to rotate volunteers in keeping up the so-called human shield.

The presence of civilians on the dam, however, has not stopped the air strikes against the facility. On the other hand, the casualties have not stopped people from maintaining the picket, with many volunteering there more than once.

According to the Rojava Information Center, 20 civilians have died and at least 126 confirmed wounded in the airstrikes in and around Tishreen, although the injury figure is only a conservative estimate and local media regularly cite more than 200 wounded at the site. Among the dead are three ambulance drivers and three journalists, as well as local politicians, a football coach, and a renowned TV actor whose funeral became possibly the largest seen in Qamishlo throughout the civil war. In one particularly agonizing strike, a couple from Kobane was killed inside their car, leaving their infant child back home orphaned.

Talking to Turning Point over Signal, a Belgian volunteer described a scene of destruction in Tishreen after weeks of continuous bombardment. She followed one of the convoys at the end of January from Kobane to the dam.

“As we arrive [in Tishreen], there are abandoned buildings and newly constructed buildings that were never inhabited, mostly destroyed. This is the reality of war which is visible in the eyes of all the civilians defending their territory, and their right to have electricity and live in decent conditions,” she said. “On the dam itself it is even more clear: tens of burned cars, a vision of horror.”

According to her, the convoys are mourned and celebrated in terrifying shifts, with civilians honoring the sacrifice of those who have died while supporting the new volunteers. In Kobane, within one day, people can passionately mourn the fallen in the morning and ecstatically celebrate in the evening when the bulk of the convoy returns safe and sound. The Martyrs Cemetery and The Free Women’s Square—the town’s main roundabout where many mass gatherings take place—seem to physically epitomize the feelings of dignity and sorrow that characterize daily life in the city.

“The start of the convoy is a celebration at the departure and arrival. The people who have already left wish us a good trip, that we return safely, showing the importance given to this action and all our lives”, she said. “At the return, cars, kalashnikovs, and fireworks greet us. We have the impression that it is the Newroz festival, the day of the beginning of spring.”

She says people are ready to take big risks because the Tishreen Dam symbolizes life and the future of their children in the region. According to her, going to Tishreen is far from “simple human shield” or “suicide mission.” Everyone understands the danger, but defending the vital energy source and fighting potential siege around Kobane is not just military, but also a social struggle against colonization of their lands.

“Why would we leave the dam after our daughters, mothers, uncles, and aunts have died there? We fight until we reach our goal,” said Adli, a member of HPC-JIN in Kobane, who had gone to the dam twice herself. The Civil Defense Force (HPC) is a civilian organization akin to a homeguard, intervening in sometimes violent inter-family disputes, drug dealing, and other potential breaches of urban peace. Now, the HPC has set up guard posts and patrols the town’s neighborhoods to prevent Turkish agents or other hostile elements from infiltrating the town for spying or sabotage.

On her first shift at the dam, Adli was also injured. Shrapnel from the missiles or exploding cars struck her face and arm, but she hid her injuries because she did not want to be evacuated. However, it was on her second time at the dam, when she described witnessing a “very heavy war.”

“They hit in front of us, behind us, and on us. We were dancing and they hit directly in the middle of us,” she said. 

On January 18, a video clip surfaced on pro-Turkish Telegram channels, showing a drone dropping two grenades in the middle of dancing civilians. The Human Rights Watch (HRW), who also verified the video, denounced the targeting of civilians, including strikes against ambulances, as “apparent war crimes.” The high resolution of the video suggests that the drone operators were fully conscious of the civilian nature of their targets.

“At this moment we were just dancing there; we were maybe 20 or 25 people dancing, and more people around. I just saw a smoke cloud going up and felt a hit in the stomach,” said Lea Bunse, a German environmentalist who was injured in the attack.

Two weeks later, Bunse was still at a hospital in Heseke, where last operations were still under way to remove shrapnel from her legs, stomach, and chest. Already in good spirits and stable health, she was eager to get out and continue her work in the region, although she criticized the “international silence” surrounding the events in Tishreen and the Turkish air operations in northern Syria. According to her, United Nations personnel were on the site at the same time with her, clearly witnessing the air strikes against civilians.

Agreeing with the HRW, she said the strikes at the dam are intentionally targeted against civilians, and there is no room for misunderstanding. “For sure I did not see anything that could confuse, nothing even remotely military [on the site]. It was mainly old people dancing there,” she said.

The drone footage which was published with the Arabic subtitle “The armed drone sends congratulations and blessings to the SDF celebrations at Tishreen Dam” is fully in line with Bunse and Adli’s description of the scene.

“Why Turkey needs to bomb so many people? Why are these warplanes not stopped?” Adli demanded answers, reiterating Bunse’s sensation of international silence and impunity.

Not letting her spirit be broken by international developments and geopolitical winds, back in Kobane, Adli remains focused in patrolling the town’s streets every night with the Civil Defense Forces. After the 2019 ceasefire agreement, the YPG and YPJ pulled their troops 30 kilometers from the Turkish border, leaving civilians like Adli and the lightly armed police force Asayish in charge of the defense. However, if a new convoy goes to Tishreen, she will not hesitate to join it again.

“Our children die defending the dam, and as mothers we stand by our fighters. As long as there is a road open, we will not leave our children alone. And if they cut the road to the dam, we will walk there over the water,” she said, waving her hand intensely to mark her words.

Adli has a daughter on the Euphrates front line in the ranks of the Women’s Protection Units, and for her, like many of the town’s residents, continuing to fight by all means available is not only a political, but also deeply personal commitment. In Kobane, resistance runs very much in the family.

“As mothers, we will fight even with stones if it boils down to that. Like the Palestinians fought Israel with stones, we will do the same here.”