Ebook: Long shot: the inside story of the snipers who broke ISIS

Outside Sarrin, southern Rojava, April 2015 -- Kobani, December 2013 to April 2015 -- Kobani, September-October 2014 -- Britain and Sweden 2004-2013; Rojava, September-December 2013 -- Qamishli, December 2013 to June 2014 -- Kobani, October 2014 -- Sardasht, 1983-1997 -- Kobani, October 2014 -- Kobani, October 2014 -- Mahabad, 2002 -- Kobani, November 2014 -- Kobani, November 2014 -- Iran to Europe, 2003-2004 -- Kobani, November-December 2014 -- Leeds, 2004-2011 -- Kobani, December 2014 and January 2015 -- Outside Kobani, January-February 2015 -- Southwest of Kobani, March 2015 -- Close to the Euphrates, March-April 2015 -- Kobani, April-May 2015 -- Kobani, May-June 2015 -- Kobani, July 2015 to April 2016 -- Silemani, Frankfurt, Brussels and Leeds, 2016-2018.;"A gripping narrative by an Iran-born Kurdish journalist who joined the ranks of the Kurdish army as a sniper in the fight against ISIS. In 2002, at the age of nineteen, Azad, a young Iranian-Kurdish man, was conscripted into Iran's army and forced to fight against his own people. Refusing to go to war against his fellow Kurds, Azad deserted and smuggled himself to the United Kingdom, where he was granted asylum, became a citizen, and learned English. But more than a decade later, having returned to the Middle East as a social worker in the wake of the Syrian civil war, Azad found that he would have to pick up a weapon once again. In September 2014, after twenty-four days of intensive training as a sniper, Azad became one of seventeen volunteer marksmen deployed by the Kurdish army when ISIS besieged the city of Kobani in Rojava, the newly autonomous region of the Kurds. In Long Shot, Azad tells the inside story of how the Kurdish forces fought nine months of bloody street battles against the Islamic State. Vastly outnumbered, the Kurds would have to kill the jihadis one by one, and Azad takes readers on a harrowing journey behind rebel frontlines to reveal the sniper unit's essential role in fighting, and eventually defeating, ISIS. Weaving the brutal events of war with personal and political reflection, Azad meditates on the incalculable price of victory--the permanent effects of war on the body and mind; the devastating death of two of his closest comrades; the loss of hundreds of volunteers who died in battle. But as Azad explains, these were sacrifices that saved not only a city but a people and their land. Rojava was freed, and ISIS, which once threatened the world, never fully recovered"--