The small electric engine purred, and we churned our way across the river to a new country, one with new possibilities and a very uncertain future. On the other side of the river, we stepped off onto a rocky outcropping and were immediately greeted by about a dozen Kurdish teenagers. One of them asked where I was from.
“America,” I replied.
“Oh, you are American ninja!”
He then showed off some of his ninja katas, and I started laughing.
These Kurds had a reason for being in good spirits. They were coming off the front lines and getting some time off. They began loading onto the boat we had just disembarked, heading back to Kurdish Iraq. The boat took them across, then made another trip back to us. This time the heavy shit was being offloaded: DShK barrels for the 12.7mm Russian machine gun. Ammunition. Hand grenades. This was their logistical resupply for the fight against ISIS.
A couple of pickup trucks met us at the shore, and we threw our bags in the back with the war material. We were driven up the hill to the YPG headquarters, situated on a mountaintop overlooking the town of Derik. When we drove onto the base, I saw CONEX containers and a fleet of white trucks with some kind of logo on the doors. I soon found out that the base had been a Chinese oil company until the war kicked off. In Rojava, oil just bubbles up out of the ground in some places, naturally staining everything black and crumbling the asphalt. There were inoperable pump-jacks on the base and, as I came to find out, spread out across the countryside.
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While we waited to be shown to our quarters for the night, we sat inside an office, chain-smoking with an older YPG member. Peter Douglass told us all a bit about his background living in Berlin and Canada; he seemed like an interesting guy. The girls were then taken to bed down with the YPJ female militia members, while the rest of us were trucked off to bunk with the YPG. We had the pleasure of a hot shower that night. The next morning, we were waiting for George’s contact to show up. I noticed that every time I tried to have a conversation with Benni, George would come strolling up and hover over us. He wanted to control the flow of information and the decision-making process.
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(All pictures courtesy of the author)
