Turkey. Suruç. 2014. An American airstrike hits an ISIS position in the Kurdish town of Kobane, Syria. The town was built during the Ottoman Empire as a railway hub connecting Berlin to Baghdad. Construction of the railroad was done by Germans, and Kobane was named after a distorted version of the German word for company, Kompanie. Several airstrikes happened in quick succession, and as the bombs began to fall, I ran from a nearby house, recently occupied by refugees from Kobane. They had a newborn baby, named Barack Obama Ahmet after the American president had decided to launch airstrikes on ISIS a week earlier. In the previous weeks, ISIS had rapidly advanced on Kobane, scattering Kurdish and Free Syrian Army forces arrayed against it, with no response from the international community. The United States was reluctant to launch airstrikes on the Turkish border supporting the Kurds, as Turkey was a strategic ally that had been trying for decades to quash its own Kurdish insurgency. Finally, as Kobane was set to be taken, American-led airstrikes began. These strikes, along with significant Kurdish reinforcements, turned the tide of the battle.