TY - BOOK AU - Azad, TI - Long shot: the inside story of the snipers who broke ISIS SN - 9781474609784 AV - DS98.72.A93 A3 2019 U1 - 956.9104/234B 23 PY - 2019/// CY - New York PB - Atlantic Monthly Press KW - Azad, KW - People's Protection Units (Organization) KW - Biography KW - IS (Organization) KW - Snipers KW - Syria KW - Kurds KW - Iran KW - History KW - Civil War, 2011- KW - Personal narratives KW - ʻAyn al ʻArab (Syria) KW - History, Military KW - 21st century N1 - "First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, An imprint of Orion Publishing Group."; Outside Sarrin, southern Kurdistan, April 2015 -- Kobani, December 2013 to April 2015 -- Kobani, September 2014 -- Britain 2004-10; Rojava, September to December 2013 -- Qamishli, December 2013 to June 2014 -- Kobani, September 2014 -- Sardasht, 1983-1997 -- Kobani, October 2014 -- Kobani, October 2014 -- Mahabad, 2002 -- Kobani, November 2014 -- Kobani, November 2014 -- Iran to Europe, 2003 -- Kobani, November 2014 -- Kobani, December 2014 -- Leeds, 2004-2010 -- Kobani, December 2014 and January 2015 -- Outside Kobani, January 2015 -- Southwest of Kobani, February-March 2015 -- Close to the Euphrates, April 2015 -- Kobani, April-May 2015 -- Kobani, May-June 2015 -- Kobani, July 2015-August 2016 -- Suleimaniyah, Frankfurt, Brussels and Leeds 2016-18 N2 - "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"-- ER -