Kobane calling

Zerocalcare, an Italian cartoonist, wrote and drew Kobane Calling, and part of it was printed in the weekly Internazionale in January 2015. The book appeared the following year, and in English it was published as Kobane Calling: Greetings from Northern Syria.

It is a piece of graphic reportage rather than fiction. The comic follows a journey its author made to the Syria-Turkey border and into Syrian Kurdistan, a few kilometres from the besieged city of Kobani, where he travelled among the Kurdish defenders of the autonomous region of Rojava and their war with the Islamic State.

The first part of the book explains what made him go, and it deals comically with the consequences of telling his parents; he travelled with a group of volunteers from Rome who wanted to support the Kurdish resistance, and the account sets out to report the conflict at first hand, with testimony from the people he met, while leaving room for the digressions and jokes that are the author's usual manner, and for the uneasiness of a visitor who knows he can go home again.