‘Long Shot’ Review: Triggering a Revolution

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From The Wall Street Journal:

For the past seven years, in the northeast wedge of Syria abutting Turkey, Iraq and Islamic State, a band of zealous Kurds have built an unrecognized state called Rojava and tried to keep it from being overrun. Rojava is governed like a 1980s Berkeley dorm discussion whose participants have acquired automatic weapons. They are anarcho-leftist, environmentally conscious, secular, socialist and radically devoted to equality of the sexes. One manifestation of this last commitment is a coed guerrilla force, including male and female snipers (féministes fatales, if you will) who have been picking off the male jihadists of Islamic State with gusto for the past five years.

A new memoir, “Long Shot: The Inside Story of the Snipers Who Broke ISIS,” tells the story of the group’s sniper battles against Islamic State, with a heavy dose of the group’s leftism. The author, writing under the name Azad Cudi, is a Kurdish sniper now in Europe. Iranian by birth, he deserted his post in the Iranian military and fled to exile in Yorkshire, England, in 2004. There he read the work of Abdullah Öcalan, the terrorist-intellectual founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and found that man’s turgid Maoism enchanting. At the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, Rojava was founded on an Öcalanist model, and in 2013, when confrontation between Rojava and ISIS became inevitable, Mr. Cudi traveled to Syria to defend it.

He fought with great distinction. In the city of Kobani, site in 2014-15 of what may be remembered as the battle that arrested Islamic State’s expansion, he spent months punching holes in the walls of abandoned houses so he could peek out and shoot ISIS fighters in nearby buildings. He killed about 250 of them in total, he says. The number is high but plausible. Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL depicted in the film “American Sniper,” had 160 confirmed kills, more than any other American in history. Mr. Cudi claims that others tallied as many as 500—a number that would rank them next to a few World War II snipers at the top of the all-time list, world-wide.

The first thing to note about Mr. Cudi’s memoir is its prose. The genre of military memoir produces more stinkers than average, often because the authors imitate only the worst aspects of Hemingway, or cannot contain their own machismo. Mr. Cudi’s revolutionary feminist training sessions must have paid off: He is observant and restrained, and totally lacking the swaggery male insecurity that disfigures so many of these books. Instead, his is filled with practical, simple descriptions of combat and sniping. The figurative language, because it is deployed sparingly, tends to work, as when he describes the frozen face of a would-be suicide bomber (shot “through his mustache” by a female sniper) as looking “like a stopped clock.”

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Keep your index finger pampered for fine sensitivity while pressing the trigger. “After a while, I learned to recognise other snipers by their whiter, cleaner, smoother forefingers.”

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One unsettling aspect of sniping is that the sniper sees his prey up close, through a highly magnified lens—but the prey does not see the sniper at all. Sniping is an act of voyeurism and homicide all at once.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal