By Dr. Adnan Bouzan

On this very day, September 19, 2014, the morning of Kobani was not an ordinary one.
The sun we had always known as warm and gentle upon our stones and streets arrived that day heavy with departure—red as an open wound. It offered no warmth, only whispering that the time of uprooting had come. Upon the walls of our homes, which had carried our voices and laughter, was inscribed the final appointment with the land, with childhood, with what remained of a life we had believed as steadfast as the mulberry and olive trees.

The wound burst wide open, and the homeland that once slept within our hearts turned into a memory slipping through our fingers like sand in an endless hourglass. We left behind everything: homes that guarded our little secrets, alleyways that bore our names, walls that echoed our footsteps, and trees that witnessed our seasons of love, joy, and tears. We left them there, in the heart of the wind, as though bidding farewell to fragments of our very souls. We carried with us nothing but hearts burdened with grief, eyes drowning in uncertainty, and footsteps stumbling along paths we had never drawn.

The Kobani Exodus was an uprooting unlike any other. It was not merely displacement from a geography, but a shaking of the soul in its depths, a shattering of the mirrors that once reflected our faces. We became strangers even to ourselves, staring into our own features and failing to recognize them. Exile became not just a distant place, but an inner estrangement—a rift within the self, a wandering with no compass but memory.

On this day, the course of our lives changed forever. We thought we were writing a passing line in the book of displacement, only to discover we were being driven to write an entire chapter in the book of humanity—about injustice and dispossession. A chapter heavy with tears and blood, but also sown with a thousand seeds of resilience. We, the children of the Kobani Exodus, carry on our shoulders a weight unseen by others: an open wound that will not heal, a deferred promise of return, and a dream we keep hidden deep within so that exile cannot steal it.

The exodus was not just an event, but a brutal turning point, a gateway into a long exile whose days stretched on until they blurred into one another like shadows, and whose nights lay heavy with sleepless longing. And yet, the dream within us did not break. We still believe that in every exile, no matter how long, lies a seed of return awaiting the rain; that every wound, no matter how it bleeds, remains a witness that we are still alive, resisting death with memory.

The Kobani Exodus is not only a memory of pain, but also of dignity and defiance. In every tear-filled eye, a new horizon is born. In every displaced child, another future is written—one more stubborn in its claim to life. And Kobani, that small city they sought to erase from the map, will remain within us the compass, the root, the wound, and the endless poem.

O Kobani, on this day we left you in body, but you remained in our souls as a homeland that never departs. Your name shall stay engraved in our hearts like a sacred scar, and we shall keep repeating: no matter how long the exile, no matter how harsh the estrangement, we will return. For you are the beginning that never fades, the mother who never dies, and the home that time can never destroy.

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