Angry Planet - The Dream of the Kurds Is Alive and in Danger

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

With America’s retreat from Afghanistan still fresh, it’s popular for politicians and pundits to bemoan America’s inability to fight and win a war. That line ignores an important bit of recent history we’ve memory-holed—the war against he Islamic State.America didn’t fight that war alone, however. Far from it. An international coalition of trained soldiers and volunteer troops recognized a horrifying threat and came together to defeat it. As terrifying as the Islamic State is, the successful campaign against it simply isn’t talked about much anymore.Today let’s resurrect the memory. With me here to talk about the war is someone who fought in it: Till ‘Baaz’ Paasche.Along with fellow soldiers John Foxx and Shaun Murray, 'Baz' is the author of America’s War in Syria: Fighting With Kurdish Anti-ISIS Forces.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. Jason Fields is on the road today. With America's Retrolet, from Afghanistan still fresh, it's popular for politicians and pundits to bemoan America's inability to fight and win a war. But that line ignores an important bit of recent history we seem to have memory-hold the war against the Islamic State. America didn't fight this war alone, however, far from it, an international coalition of trained soldiers and volunteer troops recognized a horrifying threat and came together to defeat it. And as terrifying as the

Islamic State is and was, the successful campaign against it simply isn't talked about that much anymore. But today, we're going to resurrect that memory. With me here to talk about the war is someone who fought in it, Till Baz Pasha. Along with his fellow soldiers, John Fox and Sean Murray, Boz is the author of the book America's War in Syria, fighting with Kurdish anti-IS forces. Sir, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and talking about the book at your experience. Thanks for having me. All right. So we'd like to start off with the basics.

Can you give me a little bit about your background, like where you come from, and what your interest was in the conflict in Syria? Yeah. I mean, that's quite a complex question already, which I kind of try to address in the book a little bit. But a German academic, I did my PhD in the UK in political geography, like political geography, looking at security. I worked on various forms of security as an academic for about 10 years after that. And I ended up as a lecturer at Surin University in Kurdistan and the Iraqi

part of Kurdistan and started doing research in Roja-Vars Syria, the Kurdish areas, and then got sucked into the conflict, really, to a point where I couldn't really get out of it. I felt I had the moral obligation to stay and do something because it's, you know, being a German leftist, genocide, the Holocaust, plays a very important role in my political upbringing. And, you know, suddenly there was this point in Syria where Yazidis, you know, would describe these images are only new from Auschwitz and DHS, where men dressed in black selected life according to various criteria and kill. the one that deemed North not worthy living. And the world at that point, and this was like late 2014, just did not care.

It really didn't care. There was no aid whatsoever. None. In Syria, in Iraq a little bit. In Syria, none. What were the early days of the conflict? And you were mostly a, like a combat medic, right? Yeah, I started out as just a regular,

Haval, regular fighter within the Kurdish forces and then kind of shaped by my experience is after my first stay in Syria, my first tour, if you want to use that term, I did a three-week course with a German return, and then I was one of the highest qualified medical personnel on the ground, and I became a combat medic,

and I was elected a commander into the first combat medic unit and led it into battle. But I started as a regular fighter, Yeah. And what were the early days of that war like? Yeah, it was trench warfare, essentially. Like, when all of us, like, authors from the book, like, we arrived at different times. And we had this very rudimentary training, like seven days. And then we were deployed to the front line, which were the Kurdish frontlines against Islamic State.

We were completely overstretched. So they needed bodies and rifles to basically fill the overstretched. stretched front lines and there was like one long earth burn going along the entire Kurdish areas uninterrupted. And that was the first and last line of defense against ISIS. At that point, there was no US air support or any air support. So ISIS did have the momentum. There was not necessarily always active fighting. There was a lot of sitting and waiting. But ISIS had the initiative. like they would launch assaults on the defenses and they could still stage behind like out of sight because there was no air surveillance no drones and they would just stayed out of side with an overwhelming like concentrate their power fighting force and then overrun like this overstretched defensive static so yeah it was it was trench warfare it was very it was cold muddy miserable not enough food yeah i mean there wasn't enough food in the kirtish areas i at the time. Full stop, but yeah, it was very basic.

When do things, because the book really kind of takes a phasic approach to the war, you know, it kind of starts off in 2014 and it describes the different phases of this thing. When do things change? When does it stop? Does it ever stop being trench warfare? Yes, as soon as America gets involved. Like, as soon as there's decisive American U.S. airstripe, And those, like in Syria, that wasn't a PR event, those airstrikes. Like the first phase of decisive airstrikes against the Islamic State in the Northeast, like not Kobani, which was a separate battlefield at that point, because the Kurdish areas weren't connected yet.

But in the northeast, where most of the international volunteers also where it was the moment America got involved with airstrikes, it changed the entire dynamic of the war space. It changed as soon as, because I, ISIS wasn't prepared for it. The Kurds weren't prepared for it. I remember this moment, we were like, we were on a hill besides Hasek and Tel Tamiya, like right at the front lines overlooking kind of the fairly, you know, the desert until the up there was these mountains in the distance. And, you know, suddenly we would hear this thumbing sound and the whole house would start shaking the barracks. And everyone would just run out and look at this plane. And so like, and the sky is like, jeanne. everywhere and exploding ISIS positions and the Kurds were like celebrating. They were singing, cheering. And within a week, we started going on the offensive. And we pushed ISIS, like, within a week of those decisive airstrikes, and we started going on the offensive. The Kurds went on the offensive and pushed Daesh or ISIS back deep into the Syrian desert. It wasn't a lot of populated

areas we liberated during this time, but it was a lot of space. And like, as I tried, as we tried to highlight in the book on the map, it looked like a major success because, you know, suddenly, you know, the whole, you know, basically the whole space between Hasaka, Tel Tamaia and the mountain range further south was liberated in one big push. And then we continued connecting the Kurdish homeland. And yeah, so American airstrikes changed the, change the course of the war in an incredible way. A complicated question for you that I'm going to make it a, I'm going to make an assumption.

As a German leftist, self-described German leftist, I'm going to assume you have a particular view of American hegemonic power. Very much so. How do you, like, when you were fighting this, I thought, and I thought the title of the book was very interesting and kind of the way it's put together, I want to be clear, it doesn't let America off the hook for its failures, right? I mean, in fact, I would say that, like, the last quarter of it is pretty good about, like this is where this is how here are the failures but you're you're you're on the front

lines of this thing and America starts to get involved what are your do you have concerns and worries outside of the narrow focus of survival interest trying to win those battles are you thinking about down the line yeah and and in that moment for quite frankly I wasn't an academic at all like in that moment I was well I wasn't academic and that was my problem I didn't have any experience in fighting a war. I had a seven-day training in inverted commerce. It's basically like Sean Murray and this Jefferson character that's also featured in the book, like explained how war is being fought.

They told me about the AK. They told me about the very basics. I wasn't there. In that moment, I was like trying to survive. I wasn't there as a researcher. But yeah, I mean, I, you know, when I, like as an undergrad, I was protesting the war on terror. Like, I was in, when the invasion of Iraq started, I was on like a camping, hitchhiking trip through Spain. And I participated in this big, then one million people in Barcelona demonstrating the invasion.

I thought it's horrific. I thought, you know, a lot of people, civilians will die for, for reasons that are so obviously made up. My first academic publication was against the war on terror. And I still think Afghanistan and Iraq were a complete. disaster. And frankly speaking, the reason why America was so successful in this war was not America, it was the Kurds. It was the Kurdish idea of democracy. And the reason why America was, had celebrated such a success or had such a success was that they didn't implement an own political vision or idea. They gave the Kurd space to implement their indigenous, Middle Eastern

version of democracy, equality, freedom, and federalism. And this is because America didn't introduce anything like they did in Iraq, Afghanistan. They had a very light approach, and probably by accident, they created this space for an actual democratic revolution to thrive. This, I think, is what happened. I don't think any American diplomat came up with that plan. I think it happened, it was an accident, but it was a fantastic accident. And it was a moment where, you know, eventually later on, you as special forces would work with Kurdish revolutionary women and a guy like me. And they would love it. They would tell us how much they love it.

They would tell us, like, you know, some of your elite, warrior elite would love fighting in this revolution because they saw that they're winning. They saw the people, they liberated, cheering them, flashing the victory sign, thanking America for helping them. And, you know, as one of the SESF guys told us, like, this is a fucking nice feeling. Because America, these guys didn't necessarily know that from Afghanistan and Iraq. And some of their younger guys on the teams, this was the first deployment to an actual war. They really enjoyed it. it felt like winning for them and it was. And because, you know, you had this, this Jepajéj female force,

it wasn't like a fake revolution where people talk about freedom. No, the women were there. They impacted the war. It was a third of the fighting force on the ground. They implemented revolution. And these special forces guys understood that instinctively, you know, because they saw the dynamics. Like, when I work with SF guys as a medic, all these guys took all of their commands from women in the Yeah Pesje.

All the frontline command, as I saw them interact with were women. And it worked very well. This is something I think doesn't get enough play in the West, is this understanding of the dream of Rajava, the dream of the Kurds, their dream of freedom. And I think it says pretty explicitly at the beginning of the book that one of the reasons this war was prosecuted. so successfully was because it was not just about people in the region fighting against the Islamic State. They were fighting on behalf of an ideal, a dream. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that dream is and how it's going now? Yeah. And I mean, if you look at the map and if you look at the history of the war against ISIS, I'd say the Kurds in Syria were one of the most effective fighting forces. And this is in contrast to equipment and numbers of fighters, quite remarkable.

And I think one of the reasons is because is that the Kurds were the only fraction in the anti-IISS force or alliance that fought for something positive. They fought for a positive change. Everyone else fought for reestablishing the status quo. And that includes the Kurds in Iraq, that fought for, you know, a tribal Kurdish society, that it's led by two fractions with a very powerful internal security apparatus, yada, yada, yada, you know, then you have the Assad regime, the Iraqi government with their own problems. The Kurds fought for change. They fought for a real democracy. I, as a leftist, a Democrat, would call a real democracy that is about freedom. And the problem in this debate is always, and it makes me so angry to see still so-called experts talking about the Kurds fighting for their state in Syria or for their independence because they're not.

And it's not an academic wordplay. They're fighting for autonomy. And this is such an essential difference to understand. Independence, you won't get. You won't get independence from Turkey, Iraq, Syria, dictator. Taters don't give up, don't succeed territory. But you can negotiate autonomy. Autonomy gives you the same as independence,

except you're officially not an own country. Who cares? So the Kurds understood that. And the Kurds basically say, and in their theory, is our idea of autonomy is overcoming, is intellectually overcoming the idea of statehood that brought so much evil suffering

and death to the Middle East and frankly speaking other places. They say we don't care about these things. We don't care what we cares about the way we live and the way we govern our own life and our own affairs. We want to eat our food, sing our songs, dance, our dances, and have our own security force, keeping our villages and cities and borders safe. And this is basically what the Kurds stand for. They stand for an autonomy where minorities, ethnic religious minorities, as well as youth, women, have the chance to organize themselves and defend themselves.

And yeah, this makes it a very attractive theory in the region and offers something new. Can you tell me a little bit more about what distinguishes their brand of democracy? You called it a true democracy from your perspective. What is it about what they're doing that you think other countries are failing to do? Well, I mean, this is now tricky. You could call it socialism. You could call it anarchism. You can call it grassroots democracy.

But it's basically the idea that you don't elect someone who makes decisions for you in whatever form of parliament. But it's based on an active participation in politics, neighborhoods, religious groups, whatever groups can organize, can have councils. And then they give what's being talked about in these council to like, to the top.

It goes from the bottom to the top. And then there are like regional parliaments, etc. But they're supposed to take the cues from the very base of the people and implement what the people want. Yeah, that's the idea. Yeah.

How's it going right now? That's a very tricky question because it's people always say like obviously it's a very ambitious revolution democracy project. And from my perspective, it always went surprisingly well considering that the place is in a constant state of war since the Kurdish areas basically declared autonomous when the when the Syrian regime kind of pulled out of the predominantly Kurdish areas in 2012. The place was constantly under attack. It was over most periods on an economic embargo. It's struggling to feed itself. It's struggling to get whatever electronics practical means in to get organized. So it's always at the brink of, it's always facing almost extinction since then. And all things considered, I always thought it goes very well.

And I can give you one example where I kind of would say it goes well. And this is, you know, the autonomous Kurdish government always. head or the critique was one like that they make it difficult for political opposition to operate within their areas. And that's kind of true. But and there were like a couple of people disappeared in the early days. Yeah. Like everywhere in the Middle East. But the difference in Rajava to many other places is that I could actually go to the head of the police and ask him about it. I could ask, look, there's his accusations. What's going on there? And then I would sit down with a head of the security over some tea or chai, and he would say, yeah, it's true.

You know, people disappeared, da, da, da, da. And then he would, but he would go on and explain it. He would say it's a young democracy. People were socialized in a dictatorship. They used the form of policing they encountered our torture, oppression. That doesn't excuse it. That explains it. We're trying to work on it.

We ask Europe for aid. We ask America. help, but they're not going to help us. They're not going to send trainers in, say, human rights. They're not going to send these people because they accuse us of being terrorists. So it's very tricky, you know, they do ask for help. They acknowledge the limits. You can talk to the head of the police, which you can't do in many places in the Middle East. And you won't get a feedback like, yeah, it's actually true what you're saying. So, yeah, there's issues, but there's at least the attempt to solve it.

I talk to locals, to Arab locals who went to the police station to complain about individual officers arresting them at checkpoints. In other places, you won't fight local Arabs or local people of the minority to go and complain to police stations. And this shows that it's somewhat different. And then obviously you have a third of the defense force being female. And I think about a third of the police force being female. That does something too. That changes how armed men behave. That's going to be a whole separate book I'm working on right now.

But having a strong female force on the ground that is not just a show or PR pony, but backbone of the war, it changes the way the war is being fought. And one being, there's no sexualized violence, which again differentiates this project from most of the other force. is fighting in the reason, the absence of rape. Yeah, you're working on a book about the female fighters with, is it Fox? John Fox, yeah. John Fox? Former U.S. Marine, yeah. Tell me about, because you wrote this book with two other people that you fought with.

Yeah. Right. Tell me about Fox and Murray. When did you meet them? Who are? Yeah. So John Fox, former U.S. Marine, he is kind of, yeah. he's the most like I'm a German when I when I when I mentioned to a friend I'm working with

a Marine they imagine John Fox sleeves to two American flag bold eagle big guy panisher scaltitude yeah he he is the epitome of a US Marine and yeah this is I met him in I met him in in Rajava super nice guy and we had kind of our real bonding moment and this is like the very first paragraph and the book, really when I was stuck as a medic with this little bongo van full of injured civilians, including children, babies, and like all of my other medics were busy with more. It was a shit show. Mass casualty event, civilians tried to escape through a minefield.

So I knew of this unit, a friendly unit that was nearby. So I hijacked the civilian bongo van and went over there and I just yelled, I need help. And like, John Fox without knowing what the fuck was going on, he grabbed his scumpt. kid jumped on the bongervan and said, well, I'm here. Let's roll. And this was like, like, he was there in the worst moment of my life and the lives of these civilians. And he didn't ask a single question. Like, we just raced through a bloody battlefield, you know, not able to defend ourselves trying to evacuate these people. So he was there. And this is like, yeah, we bonded in that moment. And we kind of kept touch. Kind of came up with the idea of writing this

book. Like, I always wanted to write a book about Rajat. but I didn't want to write this kind of academic book on the one hand. And then I didn't want to write about me. So, yeah, now I had John and it would be a book about the two. And then, yeah, we talked to Sean again. And we both know him from Rojava as well and he was on board. And Sean really, like he was Royal Irish Regiment, an Irishman, British military, very disappointed that the UK didn't intervene in the genocide against the Yazidis,

side of ISIS. So he came over right after he left the British military and he basically, yeah, we deployed from like we were smuggled into Syria, deployed, got in our first gunfight together. So yeah, we had this bonding moment and together we witnessed this changing battlefield. We went on these first operations with the Kurds. Yeah. And this is how we ended up working together and we just stayed in touch. The book is fascinating. I'm scrolling through it now as we're talking. because because it's this, it's on the surface, it looks like so many other books I've seen

about like a conflict or a battlefield where it's got the timeline and the maps, but then there's all of this visceral third person kind of reporting of what the battles were like and, you know, the fights and like what the three of you experienced. And that can't quite,

there's not anything else quite like it. Because it is very, it is both kind of like talking to you, both very academic and also very plugged into what was actually going on on the ground. Is that something that you kind of sought to achieve? Absolutely. Like that was like, I mean, what's on the book, I could have published in a decent geography journal as the argument, like it would be kind of a suggestion that's, you know,

how to structure the American military intervention in Syria based on grounded participant observations as well as a Focodeon discourse. analysis of the narrative by White House, State Department, etc. That kind of confirms the structure in the book. Like, this is an academic argument. You know, the argument why democratic federalism aided the military success. It could have been another paper like salami slicing my material here. But, you know, then, frankly speaking, a few handful of people would read it and be really

interested in. And our idea was to make it like something that is approachable. And then the other idea was to make it something that shows how horrible war is because sometimes I have the feeling people forget it. And frankly speaking, many of the volunteers, the Western volunteers that showed up at this war started, came with this glorified idea of war. And it's not. It sucks. Like in everyone who glorifies it, I'd argue, is either very crazy. or hasn't been close to actual war. There's nothing funny about seeing torn up children. And we need to understand that.

And this is so on the one hand, like, this is why we stopped. Like at one point, I decided we don't use all these kind of numbers that float around and statistics on war because it helps to kind of create or to kind of, we wanted the emotional aspect in there because this is what war is about. Like, yeah, it is about statistics and planning and geopolitics and maps, but it's also about horrific suffering, human suffering. And we should be aware of this when we go to war and we start wars. Yeah, so we try to have this hybrid. So we wanted people to learn something while having a decent read.

I don't want to say good, but yeah. Entertaining is also the wrong word. Engaging. Engaging. Yeah. Engaging. It's good. Yeah, I don't know if entertaining is the word I would use. I've got two quotes, the quotes that you start off the book with, I wanted to read them here and then ask you about them.

The SDF is the best unconventional partner force we've ever had anywhere. That's Brett McGirk, former coordinator for the war against ISIS. Then from Elizabeth Dent for the Middle East Institute, quote, the U.S. led operation to defeat ISIS in Syria is the most successful, unconventional military campaign in history. So we've got unconventional twice there. What was it about this campaign that was unconventional? I think it was the extremely light military footprint. And like it was a light military footprint in combination where it's with this military success. I think this was a combination.

And I think the light military footprint was enabled by having the Kurds as partners. And when I say it, the Kurds as partners, now we get into the nitty gritty of it, really, because later the alliance was with Arabs, with Christians. And this was essential also for the success. But the key to the success were always the Kurds and their political theory. That was the way in for America. Like the big Arab alliance, you know, America always talked about, that came with the Kurds.

The Kurds enabled it because the Kurds offered the Arab tribe something Assad and ISIS couldn't. And this was, and I think. think this is until today what many, especially politicians in Washington, fail to understand. It's a Kurdish political theory that gave America this success. And I can give you another example that's not just about the fighting. America didn't need an invasion occupying force. Because again, they work with a work with very friendly militias on the ground. And the militia and the Kurds set up a system where basically local Kurds would secure the checkpoints and the villages and the Kurdish areas. The Arabs in their areas, the Christians in their

areas, would maintain their own police force. This is why there was no insurgency. This is why there were no attacks on US installations in the region. This is why America could travel freely without any IEDs constantly. This is why it didn't need infantry, US Marines, ending up policing, a hostile population. The population and the force itself was friendly towards America. And it was because America created space

for this indigenous democracy to grow. And I think the light, so yeah, the light footprint. The very, like America used its military mission specific, the way it was trained. They used special forces to force multiply with command and control, aka call and airstrikes, direct support with mortars. You know, you had your Delta guys going in with Arabs with their Oakley wraparounds and pimped up AKs doing their stuff. You had engineers billing airfields, buggering off as soon as there were bills. You had Marines coming in with, again, artillery doing just their thing, not policing,

population artillery support. And this is everyone did the job they were trained for and force multiplied very successfully. Maybe this is a hard question to ask you because you're not American, actually, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Why do you think this conflict has fallen out of our consciousness? In the U.S., we just don't ever talk about it at all anymore. It doesn't register. And when people talk about recent American failures,

this is just left off the list, even though it was a great success. Yeah. My honest answer would be the lack of war porn. There was so much, really? There was so much Islamist. But from Syria? Yeah, but not from Syria and special forces.

And I think there was not enough images coming from that war. There's tons from Missouil. But that was some point, and Mosul, there's books about it. There's still things going on. In Syria, there were, it was very difficult for journalists to get to the front lines. I don't know of, I know of a couple that got fairly close, but they got close because they didn't carry cameras. I think there is, I think there is a lack of images from this particular theater that goes beyond attractive yeah pege women with guns, which is a very problematic discourse that comes.

I think it's a wrong discourse that came out of it. But I think the difficulties of going there also shows why there's so little reporting from the more feminist side on the Yepp issue. That's the one thing. And the other thing is PKK. Let's address the elephant in the room. Like any publication, let it be like high quality, the economist outlets, even vice, whatever. They all start with his disclaimers, link to the PKK, Syrian branch of the terrorist organization. Before, okay, let's, before we dive too deep into that,

give anybody who may not know, what is the PKK, why would it be considered problematic in Western media? What's the relationship with Turkey there? I know we could do like a whole episode on that, but. Yeah, I actually, in the book on the Yeppurje, I, I'm working on the manuscript right now. I explicitly say in the introduction, like, I'm saying this once the connection to PKK, and then that's it because I'm getting, I'm like, and I don't want to sound like an arrogant twat, but I'm getting a bit bored by it.

But I've got to do it here, I understand that, but it's very simple. The Kurds are a stateless nation. They're distributed about four countries, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. All four countries are hostile towards the Kurdish minorities. So in all four countries, the Kurds organized their resistance. The problem for the Kurds in Syria and Turkey is that Turkey is that Turkey is a NATO member state. So fighting a NATO member state as an underground organization makes you in the eye of every NATO member, a terrorist organization. The PKK is fighting for Kurdish rights in Turkey.

So Turkey sees them as terrorists. Now, how are the Kurds of the PKK connected to the Syrian Kurds? That's actually, many of the Syrian Kurds ended up in the state of Syria because of the genocide by the Turkish state against the Kurds there. They were pushed out of Turkey over the Baghdad Berlin railroad tracks onto the Syrian side of the desert. In Syria, the Assad regime disenfranchised them, made them stateless people. so ideas of organizing resistance became popular there. I mean, along the way the Kurds got used in a proxy war between Assad and Turkey. They were basically there the historic underdogs.

And the reason why the PKK is supporting the Turks in Syria when they got attacked by ISIS is because there are one people. And cross-border support making the most of the borders and somehow using them for their advantage was always part. of Kurdish survival. Without cross-border solidarity, the Kurds as an ethnic group would not exist anymore, full stop. They don't have their own state, so at least they need to make use off the borders to escape genocide. The Iraqi Kurds fled many times to Iran. The Iranian Kurds fled to Iraq. The Turkish Kurds fled to Syria and Iraq. The Kurds always made deals with the devil in other

countries to survive. It's part of a state. It's a history of a stateless people. And this is why, you know, returning back to your earlier question, this idea of democratic confederalism and a democratic, a theory, a political theory, overcoming the state intellectually, this is where it comes from. They are the losers of nation state in the Middle East, the Kurds. So they're the ones thinking critically about the state. Kurdish intellectuals always had a very critical, very smart debate about statehood, autonomy, independence. Because for them, again, it's not an intellectual exercise. It's about survival. Understanding the difference between autonomy and independence is about preventing another genocide. Ask the KRG.

When they did their vote for independence away from autonomy, Iraq's threatened to invade again. It's enormously important, and we need to pay attention to these details. We'll need to listen to their intellectuals, what they have to say about terms we take for granted. You think it's so interesting, because in a lot of ways, I feel like the world is like in a political morass. There's not a lot of ideas. There's not a lot of new ideas. Nobody's telling a new story about how things could move forward.

Everyone generally agrees that things feel shitty, and most people don't have an idea of how to make them any better. Yeah. Except there. Yes. Exactly. They're trying some things. Yes. They have some ideas.

They have some ideas that are not authoritarianism. Nope. Right? So I am interested in what's going on there, because it is this, these experiments are taking place. And not a lot of us are paying attention to them. No. Very much so. It is absolute, like I'm a political geographer.

It's fascinating what's happening there. The details of the language are absolutely fascinating. This is like, this is another point that shows the example on why is this is a successful link to the theory. And this is like Syrian democratic forces, the Kurdish forces, we never went to liberate four people. All military, all offensive military operations, the Kurds and the Arab allies and the Christian allies do, are always on the invitation by the people occupied by ISIS. We always fought with a local military council made up of the people from, say, al-Shedat, Mambesh, al-Takba, Araka, and so forth. And the Kurdish forces always pulled out after the military operations.

They state they trained up a local force that resembles the local population, meaning if it's 50-50 Arab Kurdish, that the defense force of that region, that city, that area wouldn't be 50-50 Kurdish Arab. And the actual kind of hardcore Kurdish fighting force would always pull out because it was needed elsewhere. The fighting units were too precious to leave them and occupy. This is why Kurds never occupied. They never went in and occupied any land. So the people saw what was going on. The villagers saw what was going on. And I'm coming back to the Yepeje, the all-female force.

Imagine you have, imagine a villager in like, say, south of al-Shadat, somewhere between like the Turkish Syrian border and Iraqa, haven't really enjoyed any schooling, you know, Sunni Arabs, disenfranchised by the Assad regime, live in their villages, have their goats, maybe go to the market in the next larger city. They've seen quite a few men come to their village, tell them, you know, this is us, we bring you freedom, we bring you out, we give you your rights back, as ISIS said, we make you, you know, first-class citizens again, you know, the Sunni Arabs and the Caliphate, and then they break their promises. And because it's armed men, now you have the, now you have Syrian democratic forces come

into this village. Like, there's these women, all dressed in black, huddled around their children. There's a big German, a big Brazilian that just kicked in their doors, looking for IDs. They're like hovering over their children. And then there's a truck full of Yepperje, of women driving their own truck, coming, 12 women, armed, confident, hair flying in the wind and giving and telling them, you're free now.

Take that crap off if you want to. If not, I don't care. Burn it. If not, I don't care. But yeah, we're here to free you, sisters. So let's have charge. And if you scared that bad man come back, we'll train you on the AK. We'll give you weapons to defend your children, women. People understand that this is different. These villagers understand that this is different. And this is what fascinated and specifically John. John said, like, no marine unit could have pulled that off, winning over civilians, getting real-time, intel on the enemy by civilians. Not like a platoon of Marines in full battle rattle could not pull that off. Only women that fight can pull that off. This level of like these women, these Arab women in the village, they understand 40 years of intellectual struggle in no time,

in no time just by seeing the Yepeje, doing what they do, liberate, protect, like the Yepeje are the guardians of this political. theory because that's the Middle East, right? And it's the most progressive, all-female fighting for, as I will argue, in my forthcoming book that exists, road history, that includes the mythical animasons. They are like, my problem with the book is, how do I get 60,000 words? Because the argument is so simple. Just look at them. And like, it's, yeah, it's mind-boggling that we don't pay more attention to this phenomenon. It's, there's so much there.

Like, yes, there are problems. Yes, there are connections to PKK. And yes, it's about an absolute uncompromising gender equality. There was no rape. I've never met anyone, any of the international volunteers that saw sexual violence. No, even within the hour, the Yepeger, the male force, there was no locker room talk. none of this existed. There was no posing by armed men in front of civilian, scared civilian women.

None of these shit, you see, from all the other conflicts, did not exist. It just wasn't there. And I'm not whitewashing it, right? I don't have anything, like, I don't have anything to win from gain from this. I'm saying this because it's fascinating and we need to look at it because it's exciting and because it's new. And right now, like, this social experiment exists since a decade, since almost 10 years, right? Like, this is a revolution that hasn't sold out so far. It's still working, it's still trying to get better, despite Turkey now staging yet another invasion into Kurdish-dominated areas,

basically conducting yet another stage of a form of genocide by displacing Kurdish people from their homeland. The Kurds live in the Syrian desert at this point. They're called Kurds means the mountain people, right? That's a result of displacement. And this democracy project, despite America being there, is threatened by Russia, by Iran, and by Turkey. When did you leave? I left Rzava, Syria, in July or August,

July, 2016, because I stayed until my body gave. in basically. I was just, I was done. My body was telling me this is it. Like you did, you went like, you, yeah, you helped create this medic team. You know, you, your silly PhD with no military experience in a three week workshop and, and, and I was responsible for triage in the desert. I had to decide which injured child we tried to save and which one is going to die. I will, you know, we work with you as special forces that did check my background. And yet they worked with us because it was so bloody desperate in this battle. And eventually my body's, I couldn't walk anymore. I couldn't keep food in me. I was just done. So I talked. Yeah, my team said, dude, you're not helping us anymore.

You're now becoming a burden. And once you command at the unit, you can't just, you know, kind of give up command, go on a holiday for months and then come. It just, my time was done. But then, yeah, I went, I went in 2017 and led a civilian medic team with another friend of mine during the battle for Mosul. So this was, again, like, I'm working on something there because I wasn't, we weren't actually involved in the physical battle in the city, but we were rolling with the Shia militias in the desert east of Musul. Like, we would, we would hang out next to Kut's force guys supervising Katir Paspaula. So this is wild, but different wild.

But yeah, it's 2017. And then I realized that it's good for me to stay away from wars for a while. Like hashtag post-traumatic stress. Yeah. Do you miss it? Oh, yeah, every day. Again, hashtag post-traumatic stress. Yeah, every day.

I miss the war every day. And I miss not being in the war. Like, I'm an intellectual that ended up in this really, really intense war. and like I can't brush this off like that war defines who I am since I'm back this is why I'm having these problems you know am I am I you know the the the white middle class PhD dude I'm my bars like you know you have a white middle class PhD dude and you have bars which you know some marines call salty it's it's like but yeah I'm you know I can kind of you know bars as of me, this war persona, and after the war, I, you know, I didn't go back to academia and I didn't

live, I moved out of the city, as I say, in the conclusion. I still, you know, I live in Canada in the forest and trying to make sense of it all still. And, and it, yeah, there's like, I'm writing a lot and I'm thinking a lot about it. And I'm trying to put it into, I'm trying to put what I saw into context of what's going on right now. And that includes Ukraine. So I'm, I'm yeah, I miss the war, I think about it, I'm glad. And at the same time, I'm so glad to live in Canada where there's security, right? As a leftist academic, you end up seeing security as something negative because it involves with neoliberalism, privatization of security functions, outsourcing, you know,

PMCs, private securities, and, you know, and it becomes something different. And since the war security is to me the most privileged state of being, being secure, being out away from physical harm, not worrying about my family, not worrying about being drafted, not worrying about all of these things. It's, you know, I enjoy life so much since I'm, like I never did before, you know, I, you know, I stressed about academic publications and silly impact factors. which is like so fucking meaningless, to be honest. No offense to anyone chasing. This is your thing. But for me, after this war, yeah, a lot of things lost their meaning. And yeah, I miss it every day.

I think about it every day. And I'm happy not to be there every day as well. So I'm very conflicted. How's your appetite for eggs? Oh, man, I can't get enough of eggs. I still associate them as protein. It's, yeah, I'm back to being vegetative. Aryan since the war, but still

laugh the X, yeah. All right, Baz, or Till, depending on how you're feeling. Yeah, go with Bath right now. Yeah, Baz. Thank you for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this. The book is America's War in Syria, fighting with Kurdish anti-IS forces.

Everyone should check it out. Thanks so much for having me. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, Kevin O'Dell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like us,

if you really like us, go to angryplanet.substack.com or angryplanetpod.com where you can get bonus episodes and commercial free versions of the mainstream episodes. Again, that's at angry planetpod.com. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on Angry Planet. Stay safe.

Until then.