Many young people in the wealthy nations of Europe and North America, having been taught by their elders to equate morality with risk-free virtue-signaling, have plenty of strong opinions about injustice and oppression, but the will to do anything about it often seems lacking.
It wasn’t so with Anna Campbell, a 26-year-old from Sussex, England. Campbell studied at Sheffield University but decided academic life wasn’t for her, so she trained as a blacksmith and later as a plumber. She read about the struggle by Kurds in the Middle East to create an independent secular state—how the Kurds are fighting the governments of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq for independence, on one side, and fighting ISIS for survival, on the other.
So Campbell left England and traveled to Syria to join the women’s unit of the U.S.-backed People’s Protection Units, or YPG, the Kurdish militia. She learned to use high-powered weaponry and dyed her blonde hair black to look less obviously Western.
Campbell fought for a time in Syria in operations against ISIS, but when she heard about the Turkish offensive against the Kurdish city of Afrin, she begged her commanders to send her there. They relented. On March 15, a convoy she was traveling in was hit by a Turkish missile.
We would not counsel a son or daughter to leave everything behind to fight in a foreign militia’s cause. Perhaps it was a foolish expedition. But it’s impossible not to admire this young woman’s will, her readiness to take a risk in a worthy aim, and her insistence on aligning her idealism with her actions.
“It seems a small thing,” her father, Dirk Campbell, told the Guardian, “but I remember when she was 11, she protected a bumblebee from being tormented by other kids at school. She did it with such strength of will that they ridiculed her. But she didn’t care. She was absolutely single-minded when it came to what she believed in, and she believed what Turkey is doing is wrong.”
