Anyone who sets off to the mountains to join the guerrilla carries their own stories with them. Later, new stories are added in every step of the way. The story of Gülbahar, now a guerrilla fighter on one of the highest mountain peaks in the Medya Defense Zones, begins in the Northern Syrian Plains of al-Bab.

Gülbahar Botan was born in the village of Kefer Zixerê near al-Bab. She is one of seven children of an Arab mother and a Kurdish father. At the age of five, she wondered who the man in the picture on the living room wall is. When she grew up, she learned from her father that it was Abdullah Öcalan. A little later, the "Apocu" (Apoists) came frequently to visit their house and the picture won magical attraction for her. There was an increasing number of Apoist women and men, for the house of the family became a stopover for those “sent from home to the country". Gülbahar asked her father many questions and listened to the stories of the Apoists whose name was strictly forbidden at that time. Her dad said to her, "You have to grow a bit, then you can become like these women." Until she joined the PKK, she spent her time going to school, helping with housework, and the looking after "guests" when they set off.

Al-Nusra attacks

One night in 2012, the family wakes up with the noise of breaking the front door. Unsympathetic armed men invade all rooms and loudly order the family to gather in the living room. Later Gülbahar learns that they are members of the Al-Nusra Front. The horrified cries of their younger siblings mingle with the threats of militia members. They speak Arabic and Turkish. First they destroy the television, the radio and the telephone, then they smash everything they can get their hands on. Gülbahar's father is slapped, kicked, beaten with rifle butt.

Gülbahar and her siblings do not understand what's going on. Gülbahar tries to help her father with her mother. Both are thrown to the ground. When the men threaten to kill their little siblings, Gülbahar and her mother get silent and wait. A Turkish-speaking militia officer gives orders to his men, Gülbahar's father is beaten even harder. Then they take him with them because he helped the Apoists. Gülbahar remembers his words later when he was dragged away: "Do not be afraid, I'll come back." Together with her mother and siblings, she stares after him.

"It felt like the darkness of the night had suddenly entered the room. We ran after my dad, but they put him in a car and drove off quickly. We could not tell anyone about it. If the Syrian regime had heard it, things could have gotten worse. We were all shaken. My mother tried to give us strength, but she was even worse than us," tells Gülbahar of that time.

The right time has come

Gülbahar does not want to resign herself to the grief and anxiety she experiences at home. She is convinced that now is the right time to join the liberation movement. She wants to be like the Apoists her father told her about and the armed men of the militia are afraid of. "I wanted to meet the right time and wondered if I should wait for my father's return. I also wondered if it was right at this time to leave my mother and siblings. My dad had very much wanted me to join (the guerrilla)."

She no longer wants to wait inactively and says goodbye to her mother with the words: "Tell father, when he comes back, that I went after the stories of the Apoists."

On the way to the mountains, she has to wait in a house for a while to find out that her father has been released from the Al-Nusra imprisonment by the YPG. She shows the couriers, who will accompany her on the way for a long time, photos of her father in the circle of his family and embraces her companions with joy.

"At that moment, it became clear to me once again that I had made the right decision. That could not be a coincidence, "she says. Convinced that the Apoists will leave no one halfway behind who has been good to them, she continues on her way.

The own story

Now Gülbahar fights in the mountains against the ISIS, the militia of the Al-Nusra front or the Turkish occupiers, who wear only a different garment. The sincere and cordial relationship with the guerrillas is like medicine to them to handle the hard times they have experienced. She sent a letter to her father. She has signed him with "Your Apoist comrade Gülbahar". In the letter she tells about her story in the mountains. This time she herself appears in it, it is her own story.

I ask her what it's like for her to be in a position on a mountaintop. Between the noise of passing Turkish fighter jets, she repeats a sentence by Abdullah Öcalan, whom she heard in the video footage of one of his analyzes: "He who walks on level paths has weak legs." It was not easy to get accustomed to the steep mountain paths after the northern Syrian plain. She had bloody knees for a long time because she fell down all the time, she says. At some point she learned to move in the mountains.

"Sometimes I have to laugh at myself when I remember the first times," Gülbahar says, adding that contemplating life from a hilltop makes up for everything experienced.