Twelve years after ISIS hit Kobani on 15 September 2014, the author says the city again saw outside gunmen, takbir and racist slogans, live fire, beatings, and nine prisoners dead in a fire after transfers toward Aleppo. The spark named is the abduction, filming, and killing of Kurdish fighter Sîpan Hezni—already folded from the SDF into the Hasakah Brigade of the Syrian Defense Ministry.

Local Asayish tried to contain a protest; Idlib-linked road security (Shahin of Sarmada) and later General Security entered. Detainees were to go to Aleppo under Majd al-Din al-Sheikh (Abu Omar), brother of a former HTS figure now advising al-Jolani. A prison revolt and fire followed. Name, language, and Tal Abyad return fights are listed as prior fuel.

Weeks after Mazloum Abdi announced SDF and Autonomous Administration dissolution into the state, the piece reads integration as Kurdish leverage gone first, rights later. Turkey’s welcome of that dismantling is noted. Kobani’s 2014 memory, the author says, does not treat new uniforms as a clean break from jihadist-era humiliation. A burned body, the closing line, does not ask the flag’s color.

Today marks the twelfth anniversary of the major ISIS offensive launched against Kobani on Sept. 15, 2014. Twelve years ago, ISIS advanced on the city from several directions with tanks, artillery and heavy weapons seized in Iraq and Syria, overrunning villages and displacing tens of thousands of people from the surrounding countryside before reaching Kobani itself. The city would become one of the most symbolic battlegrounds in the war against ISIS, not only for Kurds but internationally. Yet this anniversary arrives with scenes many residents believed they had already paid enough blood never to witness again: armed men from outside the city, cries of takbir, racist and inflammatory slogans, live fire, arrests, beatings and humiliation, followed by Kurdish bodies burned inside prison cells. The flags have changed, the names have changed and the uniforms have changed, but Kobani’s memory does not need much effort to recognise the scene.

This time, the immediate spark was the killing of the Kurdish fighter Sîpan Hezni. Sîpan had previously served with the Syrian Democratic Forces and, after the integration agreements with Damascus, had joined the Hasakah Brigade under the Syrian Ministry of Defense. In other words, he had already done what Damascus and Ankara had demanded for years: he had left an independent Kurdish military structure and entered the Syrian army. Yet he was abducted by an armed Arab group, filmed as a captive, killed and publicly displayed through circulated footage. For Kurds, this could not be understood as merely another murder. The method of abduction, filming, killing and dissemination recalled the visual and political language of ISIS, which did not simply kill its victims but turned killing into a message aimed at the community to which the victim belonged. The bitter contradiction was obvious: integration had not protected a Kurdish fighter who had already integrated.

Sîpan’s killing triggered demonstrations across Kurdish areas, but Kobani was already politically tense. In recent months, residents had protested the renewed use of “Ayn al-Arab” in official documents instead of Kobani, seeing it as part of a much older struggle over Kurdish identity and the naming of Kurdish places. A second dispute concerned education, after the Syrian Education Ministry limited Kurdish instruction to three classes a week while Kurdish educators in Kobani demanded........

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