Born in Sardasht, an Iranian border town one hundred and thirty miles north of Tawella, Azad – a nom de guerre meaning “free” or “freedom” – speaks from experience. He was drafted into the Iranian Army in 2002, when he was eighteen. Assigned to a mountain patrol, he was ordered to open fire on a group of Kurdish PKK guerrillas. Azad refused, deserted, and became an underground activist. When the authorities began looking for him, he paid a people smuggler to take him to Britain, where he began a new life as a student and delivery driver. His book Long Range focuses on a five-month house-to-house battle in the Turkish border town of Kobane in 2014–15, during which he was one of five snipers who killed nearly two thousand jihadists. Their unit was instrumental in the fight that saved Rojava and turned the tide of what had until then been an unstoppable Islamist advance. “I have often been asked how many we killed. I have always refused to answer. Only a weak man would measure himself in deaths. Only a fool would try to describe all the hatred, loss, sacrifice and love of war in a number. If only to put the matter to rest, let me say up front that in eight months our snipers decimated them […] My task in these pages is to explain how we accumulated these terrible figures in a way that you can understand.”