Faces of war: Kurdistan’s armed struggle against Islamic State

The war against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has flooded our daily news with troubling statistics of massacres and mass migrations, yet there are faces and human stories at the heart of the conflict. Joey L wrote: “From Iraq, one crosses the Tigris River into war-torn Syria, and is catapulted into a worldview crafted by the guerrilla.”“You are welcomed back by familiar faces wearing a palette of earth tones interrupted by a brightly coloured scarf – probably given to them by their mothers. Conversations over cigarettes and tea with much too sugar often drift to conspiracy theories about the entire world plotting to destroy their cause. Oddly, these discussions begin to make sense. The guerrilla’s secretive hierarchy vanishes because of its compartmentalisation, and you find yourself among Kurds who left their families with the intention of defending their culture and way of life. We had once again entered the world of the Kurdish guerrilla.”“I could read all the articles, books and social media accounts in the world about what led to the war in Iraq and Syria, but that doesn’t constitute experience. The reality was that a burning curiosity – or shall I say a compulsion – drove me to observe what was happening on the ground with my own eyes, independently and unfiltered from the media I had lost trust in.”“Since I became interested in photography as a young kid, all of the photographers I had looked up to and who had inspired me had inevitably covered conflicts. I had seen striking photojournalism spanning the generations of war in Kurdistan – but the portrait project I envisioned was different. I felt the public (myself included) was becoming fatigued with seeing images of war. War, particularly when it’s not happening on one’s shores, can feel far away and unrelatable. However, if a certain shift of style is enacted, then the viewer may actually pay heed. This is what makes portrait photography unique from more purist strands of documentary photography.”“I took another photograph of Berivan with one of her fellow female fighters, Silava. While the pair looked stoically into my camera as I took shots, they suddenly broke out laughing together. They then insisted that if I was going to publish one of the images, then I should use the laughing one, as it is ‘more realistic, because we always laugh when we fight on the frontlines.’”“The Kurdish plight seemed oddly familiar. Even though the Isis propaganda had succeeded in scaring me shitless, I came to the conclusion that a project on Kurdish culture required a focus on Kurdish fighters – the armed defenders of a distinct heritage and language. There was something special about their struggle that at that time, I could not properly articulate. I just felt like it had to be explored in depth, and documented in a way outside of the constraints typical of mainstream journalism. There was no rational newspaper, magazine or online publication that would have sent me in place of their much more experienced staff. But frankly, that was OK, because I also wanted to be entirely in control of my own affairs – especially security.”During his travels, Joey observed ragtag volunteer guerrilla fighters with mysterious links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) grow into a fully functional army and the US-led coalitions most trusted partner, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).