Hannah Lucinda Smith on the frontline of the battle for Kobani.
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PICTURES Alice Martins
The tank round hit as the call to midday prayers drifted through the hazy afternoon sunshine, adding a booming low bass note to the mosque muezzin’s lilting a capella.
“See, here we’re hearing the call to prayer and over there they’re shelling,” says Ismail, a dumpy middle-aged man in a faux-leather jacket. “Today is one of the holiest days, and instead of praying they’re killing other Muslims.”
It was the day before Eid al Adha – the Islamic feast of the sacrifice – and I was sitting on top of a flat – roofed house watching Syria’s latest tragedy unfold.
The town of Kobani was on fire.
It was laid out like a diorama in front of me, its dolls house scale mosques and apartment blocks and its neghboursgoods piled like a wedding cake around the hill that rose from the centre.
I could see every shell and tank round that slammed into it.
ISIS – Syria’s ultra-violent Islamist mafia – biled the battle as the grand finale to a blitzkrieg.
Kobani, a Kurdish-controlled enclave stranded in a sea of Islamic State territory, was set to be their next big victory, the new jewel in their gruesome and growing crown.
In slickly-produced Internet videos, they crowed they would be performing their Eid prayers in Kobani’s mosques.
So when ISIS’ bearded and balaclava-clad fighters began sweeping through the farmland surrounding the town, waving the black flag that has become the symbol of their savagery, the people living there didn’t wait to find out what might happen next.
More than 180,000 people fled their homes with little more than what they were wearing, sparking a humanitarian crisis on an enormous scale.
More refugees crossed over the boarded into Turkey in the space of the two days than in the entire first year of the Syrian uprising.
An entire chunk of the country was turned inside out.
A week before the beginning of what became known as the Battle for Kobani, I sat at the border fence watching the steady stream of exhausted-looking people passing through it.
It was October and an old Kurdish grandmother with tribal tattoos on her chin shuffled through carrying a huge jar of olives.
She was so old she couldn’t even remember what year she’d been born, but she had lived on her farm her whole life.
Now, in her twilight years, a group of marauding foreigners armed with Korans and Kalashnikovs had forced her to leave it.
She’d spent four days walking across fields, hiding in outhouses and sleeping in the open air to reach this border and safety, and the whole time she’d clung steadfastly to that jar.
“They’re not having them,” she told me. “I’m not leaving my olives to ISIS.”
Ten days later, Kobani looked doomed.
ISIS had almost reached its outer suburbs and was pelting it with artillery from three directions.
The Press were there before dawn had fully broken over the first day of the battle.
They lined their satellite trucks up on a hill that commanded a perfect view of the town, aiming their cameras towards the plumes of black smoke billowing over the buildings, and pressed record.
The TV correspondents donned their flak jackets and helmets every time they went live and then took them straight off again afterwards.
The scene could have been custom-designed for television: it was panoramic, dramatic, even backlit.
The viewers who tuned in might have thought they were reporting from the thick of the battle, but it was all a piece of TV artifice.
Between the Press and Kobani there was a border – a low wire fence, a few metres of no-man’s-land, a railway line and nothing else.
Kobani’s unusual geography and proximity to that border gave the world a lens on a conflict that, as it grew ever more violent and twisted, has become virtually inaccessible for journalists.
A war in Kobani had happened a hundred times over in Syria – the only difference was this time the world could see it.
The battle for Kobani was happening in Syria but the Press were watching it from the safety of Turkey.
The TV crews settled in and made themselves comfortable.
Some had brought folding chairs, others made coffee with their portable kettles.
The agency photographers did silent battle with their huge telephoto lenses to get the best shots of the far-off action.
By the second day of their arrival a local food vendor had set up a pitch next to them.
It was a comfortable battle for the correspondents to cover.
But an agonising one for the people who had fled from it.
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“The town of Kobani was on fire it was laid out in front of me. Its dolls house scale mosques and apartment blocks and its neighbourhoods piled like a wedding cake while tank rounds slammed into it.”
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A short distance away from the Press hill, a group of middle-aged men parked up their battered dark green saloon, bonnet pointing towards Kobani, and tried to avoid each other’s eyes as each new thud sent another cloud of debris flying into the air.
They had escaped from the town ten days earlier.
Now they were watching their neighbourhood get smashed into pieces.
“The terrorists have turned Kobani into their playground,” said the man in the driver’s seat as he fished a packet of tissues out of the glove box, took one, and then passed it on to his companion in the passenger seat. “What did we do to the world for us to be punished like this?”
Kobani was once an obscure Syrian town.
Now it is the global focus of the war against ISIS.
It is also where 43-year-old British photojournalist John Cantlie was being held as I watched the town torn apart.
Just after the battle started, a couple of hundred metres further along the no-man’s-land border, among the olive trees, outhouses and chicken enclosures of a scrubby hamlet, a very different crowd had gathered.
Hundreds of men had flocked to the border, passing round pairs of binoculars and talking urgently into their mobile phones about the carnage.
Each new explosion in Kobani sent shudders through the crowd.
Some of the people who had gathered there were from the town itself, refugees who had fled the advance and were now sheltering in the shadow of the battle for their town.
Most, however, were not.
Some were from Suruc, a grimy town six miles up the road hosting most of the refugees who had fled from Kobani.
Some had travelled from cities across south-eastern Turkey.
Others pulled up in cars with Iraqi number plates.
“We can see the suffering of the people in Kobani,” says Kessam, a smiling guy in a black and white kaffiyeh. “The Kurds have to unite to destroy ISIS, because there’s no way that we can live with them.”
That border mattered little to these guys.
Wherever they came from – Syria, Turkey or Iraq – they all had one thing in common.
They were Kurds, and for them, the battle for Kobani was more than a fight for bricks and mortar.
It was rapidly turning into their Alamo, their Rourke’s Drift, their Battle of Britain – a symbol of the Kurds’ struggle against ISIS.
Outnumbered and outgunned, the Kurdish YPG fighters holed up in the centre of Kobani were trying to defend the town with a clutch of Kalashnikovs and little else.
Last month, I told how female fighters with the YPG are terrifying ISIS – because they believe getting killed by a woman will bar them from heaven.
And that means they’ll miss out on the virgins they believe are waiting for them beyond their version of the pearly gates.
But this time the YPG guerrillas couldn’t do anything to stop the shelling.
Every few hours they fired a rocket towards ISIS’ eastern position.
Most of them fell uselessly into the fields, kicking up clouds of brown dust and scaring a few cows.
When one finally found its mark, slamming into a hamlet where a group of ISIS fighters had brought their artillery, the crowd erupted in cheers and applause as though their team had just scored a goal.
But this was more than a spectator sport.
The men gathering near the border were planning something bigger.
They wanted to cross the border and join the YPG in the battle to defend Kobani.
The Turkish army had other ideas.
Nervy twenty-something fighters on their compulsory military service were lined up along the border fence, a war raging behind them and men determined to defy them and cross the border to join the war in front.
None of them looked too comfortable.
“We are trying to distract the Turks, and then we will run across the border,” said a lanky teenager who was prowling around the crowd. “Fifty people have managed to get in so far today.”
A hard-faced teenager called Massoud and his three friends hung back from the swarm, chain smoking, watching and whispering.
They were a tough little gang.
Massoud said he was 17, but none of them looked older than 12.
“I was shot by an ISIS sniper two weeks ago,” said Massoud as he rolled up his sleeve to show me his bandaged arm. “But I’m going to go back and fight them.”
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“They’re not having them. A grandmother told me. I’m not leaving my olives to ISIS.”
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Two minutes later the little mob made a break for the border, sprinting in full view of the Turkish military as an armoured vehicle sped towards them with its klaxon blaring.
Three of them weren’t quick enough.
They came within 20 metres of the border, slowed down to a jog, and then reluctantly turned back.
But Massoud ran faster than the others.
He leap-frogged the fence, stumbled, and then ran on towards Kobani, towards the shellfire and the chaos in the town.
His prowess earned him a round of applause and looks of envious admiration.
As the day and the battle dragged on, dozens of others sprinted across the border and joined him.
The cat-and-mouse game couldn’t last.
On the second day of the battle for Kobani, a small and spontaneous demonstration started up in the refugee camp next to the border.
It was filled with people whose patience had run out – they could no longer watch as the Turkish army did nothing to stop Kobani’s agony, and neither could they fathom why they were being stopped from going to join the fight themselves.
As the angry chants started up, echoing across the plains to the hamlet and the olive groves, everyone who had been watching the battle and waiting for their chance to bolt across the border instead began running towards the protest.
It didn’t take long for the Turkish police and military to respond.
Within minutes tear gas canisters were raining down on the protesters as the artillery carried on thumping into Kobani unabated.
The gas fell on the camp, on the fields where the people were watching the battle, and on the one road leading away from the border.
The path was quickly packed with cars full of people fleeing the chaos.
Their drivers, blinded by gas, swerved dangerously close to the people running away on foot.
Two hours later the crowds were back, but the protests soon started again.
As night fell over Kobani on that second day, a line of heavily armoured riot police formed a barricade across the border, separating the desperate people from the battle that was still raging through their town.
By dawn on the day after the protests, the Turkish security presence at the border had ballooned.
At the checkpoints where the day before the soldiers had taken a cursory glance at drivers’ documents there were now full boot searches and abrupt questions.
The patch of farmland was sealed off where hundreds of people had gathered for the past couple of days.
But the news from Kobani was spreading, and beyond the border southern Turkey was slowly catching fire.
The battle for a small town in Syria was reigniting old tensions between the Turkish government and the country’s Kurds.
As ISIS entered Kobani’s eastern suburbs and raised their black flag over the town for the first time, the deadliest protests since the 1990s rocked towns and cities across Turkey.
More than 30 people died in the first two nights of rioting.
Police and protestors fired on each other with live ammunition, and government buildings were stormed and set alight by furious Kurdish protesters as the battle for Kobani spilled over
the border.
In Kobani itself, though, the tide has slowly been turning.
The Kurds may have been furious at the Turks for refusing to intervene, but they have a new and powerful ally.
Just as ISIS seemed certain to take Kobani, American F-16s began circling above the town.
Airstrikes on ISIS positions have so far killed hundreds of jihadists.
The YPG, buoyed by Peshmerga fighters from Iraqi Kurdistan and groups of moderate Syrian rebels, are clinging on to Kobani – for now.
ISIS have been blunted, but beyond Kobani they control a swathe of territory that stretches all the way back to their stronghold city of Raqqa.
Maybe it is only a matter of time before they regroup, resupply and launch another massive offensive on the town.
The journalists are still camped out at the border, filing their reports and playing the waiting game.
So is the grandmother with her olives, the men in their car, and the hundreds of thousands of refugees slowly coming to grips with a life under canvas as winter closes in.