By: Dr. Adnan Bozan

On the nineteenth of September 2014, the morning was unlike any morning we had ever known in Kobani. It was a heavy morning, as though the sky itself knew what awaited the city, as though a black door had been flung wide open before one of the most painful and bitter chapters in Kobani’s memory. That day, we did not leave Kobani because we wanted to go. We did not gather what little we could carry because we had grown weary of its soil, nor did we abandon our homes in search of another life. We left because death was crawling towards us, and an entire city had found itself face to face with its fate, forced to bear alone the cost of a war it had never chosen, a cruelty it had never deserved, and an injustice stripped of even the most elementary meaning of conscience and humanity. We left Kobani as refugees fleeing certain death, not as migrants in search of a future. We left behind our doors and windows, our tables, our books, photographs and clothes; we left behind the graves of our fathers and grandfathers, and with them an entire childhood we never knew would, in a single moment, become exile.

That day, the road seemed longer than a lifetime. The people on it were not a passing caravan of travelers; they were an entire city walking on its own feet: women carrying their children, old men dragging bodies burdened by age, mothers turning back again and again as though trying to carve the image of their city into the depths of their eyes before the dust swallowed it. A child would ask, “Where are we going?” and no one had an answer. A mother would say, “We will return,” knowing somewhere deep inside that we will return was not a promise so much as the last thing she could offer a child trembling in her arms.

That day, it was not only our bodies that were displaced; our souls were displaced as well. The bread of our mothers was driven into exile with us, as were the scent of the earth after rain, the laughter of children in the alleyways, the songs of weddings, the names of the dead, and the memory of homes that no one could possibly fit into a suitcase. We had to run in order to live. And what a cruel paradox it is when a human being is forced to flee the place where he was born and spent his life—not because he betrayed that place, but because death came to it without knocking.

We fled towards the far north, carrying Kobani within our chests. The border that day was more than a line between two lands; it was an open wound between a human being and his home. Behind us lay a homeland under fire; before us stretched an exile whose length we could not know. And with every step that carried us farther from the city, a part of us remained behind. Some of us made it. Some did not. Some died on the road; others died after the road. And some remained alive in bodies that walked among people, while their hearts stayed behind, trapped in that moment when the doors of their homes were closed for the last time.

Some died strangers, the keys to their homes still in their pockets. Others lived for many years without ever making peace with the truth that they had become refugees in their own homeland. There was a mother who buried an entire lifetime inside a small suitcase, a father who kept looking south whenever he longed for home, and a child who grew old before his time because war taught him, in a single night, what a human being may never learn in an entire lifetime.

As for those who created this devastation, those who remained silent before it, or those who looked upon our tragedy with cold eyes, let them know that history may be slow to pass its judgments, but it does not forget. Maps change, banners fall, names disappear, but the memory of the wronged does not die.

And Kobani does not forget.

It does not forget those who turned its people into caravans fleeing death. It does not forget those who saw in its tragedy nothing more than a passing figure in the calculations of war. It does not forget those who treated the people of Kobani as though they were expendable, nor those who regarded the tears of its mothers as a minor detail beside political interests and calculations of power.

We are not speaking of a passing day. We are speaking of the nineteenth of September—the day when so much within us was broken, and when an exodus began that did not end with the end of the battle. For an exodus is not merely leaving your city. An exodus is living everywhere afterward and finding that you belong nowhere; sleeping beneath a safe roof while longing for the roof of your first home; walking through unfamiliar streets while your feet search for the alleys they knew since childhood; hearing other languages while your heart still calls out the names of the places you left behind; growing old far from a tree whose shade you once knew; and having a part of yourself die far from the grave beside which you had wished to be buried. It is when the homeland ceases to be a place you inhabit and becomes a pain that inhabits you.

That is why the Kobani exodus is not merely the story of thousands who crossed the border that day. It is a wound that has passed into entire generations: children who carried fear with them into schools of exile; women who carried their homes inside their memories; men who hid their tears so their children would not be afraid; old people who departed dreaming of one final glimpse of their land; and the dead whom exile did not even grant the chance to return to the soil they loved.

O Kobani, on the nineteenth of September, we did not leave you by choice. We were forced to leave you. And that difference alone is enough for the earth to know who was the oppressor and who was the oppressed.

We left you because death had never been closer to us, yet we could not take you out of our souls. We left burdened with fear, our hearts bleeding behind us. And when we crossed the border, we did not cross alone. Our homes crossed with us. The trees crossed with us. The graves crossed with us. The stories crossed with us. The names of those who had died crossed with us. And with us crossed a question that still hangs in the air to this day:

How can a human being be torn from his home and then be asked to live as though nothing ever happened?

So much happened.

An entire city tasted the bitterness of dispossession, and entire generations learned that exile is not always a choice, and that banishment may begin with a single step onto a road whose end no one can see.

And every nineteenth of September, when that date returns, it is not memory alone that comes back. The roads return. The dust returns. The faces return. The mothers and the old men return. The open doors return. And that child returns—the child who once asked, “Where are we going?”

The question still hangs in the air, because some questions do not seek answers.

They seek justice.

The nineteenth of September is not merely a date on our calendar. It is a wound in the memory of a city, the day Kobani was torn from its geography and came to dwell forever in the hearts of its people.

And we will remember—not because we love sorrow, but because those who forget their first uprooting may one day grow accustomed to being uprooted. We will remember those who died on the road, those who died in exile, and those who lived carrying a pain for which an entire homeland could find no place.

For some of the dead need no graves to remain among us.

It is enough for them to live in the memory of an entire city.

Kobani, we left you one day, fleeing death. Yet we did not know that we would carry with us something more enduring than death itself: the memory of a homeland we can never forget, and to which we can never return as we once were.