Long Shot: The Inside Story of the Snipers Who Broke ISIS

Under his nom de guerre, which means “freedom” in Kurdish, the author recounts his wartime experiences as a sniper in this gripping memoir. As a teen in 2002, the Kurdish-Iranian Azad deserted from the Iranian army to avoid being forced to fight against his fellow Kurds; he was granted asylum and citizenship in the U.K. and worked as a journalist. When the Syrian civil war broke out a decade later, he moved there to serve as a social worker; after ISIS made incursions into Kurdish territory, he volunteered to join the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, the mostly-Kurdish volunteer militia, and was trained and equipped to be a sniper. Between September 2014 and January 2015, 2,000 Kurdish people fought 12,000 ISIS fighters in the areas surrounding Kobanî, defeating ISIS and creating the autonomous Kurdish province of Rojava. Azad shot 250 enemy soldiers; his sniper team, he writes, killed almost one-sixth of the enemy forces, “street by street, house by house, and man by man.” While many sniper memoirs focus on the almost spiritual aspects of the craft, Azad takes a humbler, more earthbound stance: “Any competent soldier can learn the basics of sniping in an hour.” He is more passionate in discussing the progressive ideals of the YPG and Rojava. His story, elegantly told, will resonate long after the final ISIS fighter falls. Agent: Patrick Walsh, Pew Literary. (Feb.)