‘In Canada, I feel like I’m sucking air’: Canadian woman returns after fighting with Kurds against ISIL
Catherine Solyom, Postmedia News | August 8, 2015 3:08 PM ET
Hanna Bohman, from Vancouver, spent five months fighting ISIS with the Kurdish women's defence forces, known as the YPJ, in northern Syria. She has returned to Canada.
As news reports of Western youths joining ISIL dominated the headlines last spring, Hanna Bohman — once a fashion model, then a sales clerk — ran the other way: away from her cushy life in Vancouver and toward the front lines in the war against the jihadists.
In March, she boarded a plane to Iraq, and spent 10 days trying to get across the border into Syria to join up with the Kurdish women’s defence forces, known as the YPJ.
She had found her calling.
Now back in Vancouver after four months of moving from abandoned houses to deserted schools, she describes what drover her to the front and the unglamourous, but rewarding life, she lived in northern Syria — the area the Kurds call Rojava — and how she longs to go back.
“There was no one event that motivated me,” said Bohman, reached by phone in Vancouver. “Seeing evil beyond evil, the video of the Canadian guy (John Maguire) joining (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), the fact that governments weren’t doing anything about it. And then I learned about what the Kurds were doing, and I flew to Iraq.”
At first, Bohman, soft-spoken, but seemingly unshakable, was taken to a safe house, then to a camp in the mountains.
“It was really tranquil and beautiful and it reminded me of the Okanagan. There were little caves and little huts, hidden in the trees in the hills. I could spend a lot of time there.”
But soon, Bohman and about 10 other Westerners were smuggled across the river in the middle of the night in a rubber dinghy to a dispatch area for basic training. After only a few hours of training, learning primarily how to take weapons apart and put them back together again, she was off to the front, “which was a lot more fun.”
Bohman is one of several Canadians, though perhaps the only woman, drawn to the fight against ISIL, despite the obvious dangers. Officially, the Canadian government does not condone people going to fight with the Kurds and suggests they join the Canadian army instead. But none of them encountered any difficulties returning home.
Dillon Hillier, a native of Perth, Ont., and a corporal with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry for five years, was driven to join the fight against ISIL by the lone-wolf attacks in Ottawa and St-Jean-Sur-Richelieu, Que., last October. He fought with the Kurdish forces known as the peshmerga, and returned home in February. Brandon Glossop, a B.C. veteran of that same Canadian regiment, returned to Canada in May, but is now doing his fundraising to return to the front.
Meanwhile, a Quebecer who goes by the name Wali and who was until recently a sniper with the Canadian Forces, is now in northern Syria with the international brigades of Rojava, or YPG — the men’s brigades.
Bohman, known by her Kurdish nom de guerre, Hevi Piling, has been featured in numerous selfies and videos online over the last few months, sporting a Canadian flag sewn onto her camouflage jacket.
“I had considered joining the Canadian Army, but what I was looking for was exactly what I was doing in Rojava. I didn’t want to sit around for years in Edmonton or Ottawa.”
After a first month in defensive position, essentially on the lookout for suicide trucks, Bohman joined a mobile unit at the front. Her first night, sharing a bedroom with five other women, she woke to the sound of a firefight outside. But the others did not stir and the guard on duty did not rouse them.
“About an hour later, there was all kinds of cheering — it was impressive. The next day, I found out the village we were in was in shooting distance of (enemy) snipers, only 500 metres from the enemy.”
Often, the Kurdish forces would co-ordinate with the coalition led by the U.S. fighting ISIL, moving in after an airstrike to clear the area of any remaining fighters.
“The airstrikes would hit their position and then we’d run in and capture or kill the Daesh (ISIL) fighters. Most of the time, they would run away.”
Bohman can’t really explain why none of this fazed her. She had heard about people, even those with months of military and psychological training, who freaked out once in combat. But not her.
“ISIL fighters would sneak up and we could hear them, but not see them. They had night-vision (goggles), but we didn’t. They could be just across the street. But it didn’t bother me. I thought about why it didn’t bother me, and that’s just how I am.”
She describes seeing a man shot twice in the leg — a survivable injury, usually, but not in Rojava, where there is no medevac to get you out, and a boy no older than 14, fighting for ISIL with his father, hit by an airstrike and succumbing to a head injury.
“The airstrikes are really the terrifying thing,” Bohman said.”I’ve seen what it does to bodies. Getting killed in an airstrike wouldn’t be so bad. But being caught in a collapsed building or buried alive, crushed or suffocated…,” she said.
What she remembers most, however, is the Kurds and their incredible generosity and kindness.
“I saw bodies, and bits of bodies. I helped kill people, but I forget those things. What sticks in my mind are the Kurds. Canadians have a reputation for being friendly, but I don’t think they are. They are just polite. But the Kurds are so unbelievably friendly and nice and egalitarian.”
The women’s brigade in Rojava has equal standing with the men’s brigade, she said. Women are not there to fill a quota, or be radio operators. You could find yourself in a trench next to a man or a woman.
The situation in Rojava, however, has become more complicated in the month since Bohman has been back in Vancouver. Numerous reports this week suggest Turkey, a Canadian and U.S. ally and now an active player in the war against ISIL, was also waging war against Kurds in the region, who have long fought Turkey for autonomy.
This only makes Bohman want to return to Rojava sooner.
“I think about going back a lot. I miss my friends there and I worry about them and it felt like a real purpose. Here in Canada, I feel like I’m sucking air — not doing anything that matters.”
Some of her friends urged her not to go, she said. But most had a typically Canadian attitude.
“They say that’s really cool, but they don’t really care what’s happening there. They just latch on to the fact I used to be a model. But I’m not the story. Look beyond that.
