This Guy Is Live-Tweeting the ISIS Attack on Kobani From Inside a Pepper Bush

Meet Cahit Storm, the brave, mysterious observer who’s been watching the battle for northern Syria.

Cahit Storm/Twitter

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


For the past week, a man going by the name “Cahit Storm” has endured sweltering sun and dust storms, battled scorpions and mosquitoes, and hid in a red-pepper bush armed only with his iPhone. As he’s inched closer and closer to Kobani, the northern Syrian town that ISIS is fighting to take from Kurdish militias, Storm has tweeted everything he’s seen in broken English and astonishing detail.

“I am a witness,” he told me over the phone when I called him a couple of days ago. Storm, a Turkish Kurd, is one of the few civilians to sneak past the Turkish military, which has blockaded the border with Syria, allowing only a slow stream of refugees to pass. Most people hoping to cross the border to document or join the fighting in Kobani must evade a gauntlet of soldiers.

Storm says his primary mission is to provide aid to the refugees who have crowded into Turkish border towns. “I brought them water, candies for the children, and meat for the holiday,” Storm tells me, referring to the Sacrifice Feast, an Islamic holiday in Turkey. Yet his secondary mission as an observer of the fight in Kobani between the Kurds and the self-proclaimed Islamic State has garnered him considerable attention across social media. Among his more than 6,500 Twitter followers are journalists from the New York Times, the BBC, and the International Business Times, and Anonymous.

Storm does not provide specific details about his appearance or background on his Twitter profile, though Vice reported that he is a computer engineer who fled Kobani himself. (“Cahit” is a male name in Turkey.) As a Kurd, he is deeply skeptical of the Turkish government’s response to ISIS and its recent advances near its border with Syria. “I am quite sure if others could have reached Kobani the situation would have been very different…The Turkish are just blocking [Kobani] right now…[Turkey] has a very ambiguous attitude against daesh,” he says, referring to ISIS by the loose Arabic acronym commonly used in the Middle East. 

Storm attempts to document events in Kobani in real time as well as correct media reports he finds inaccurate. He told me that he only tweets what he’s observed or knows to be true, never speculation or rumor. “I want to only present facts,” Storm says. He continuously changes his position outside Kobani, which is right over the border with Syria. “I have to use tricks to stay hidden,” he explains. Fearing that he’ll get shot, he retreats back to Turkish border towns at night.  

His preferred choice of cover while watching the action has become one of his trademarks. “I was hiding in a pepper field because the area is forbidden and no one can enter,” he explains. He promised to eat a pepper for his 5,000th follower. Fans from across the globe have sent him pictures of peppers or pepper-related items in solidarity. He even changed his Twitter profile image to a man in a red-pepper costume.

Storm’s tweets from Kobani are detailed, terrifying, and pretty funny, too. He’s compiled images and descriptions of air strikes, bombings, and shelling in and around Kobani. His tweets about airstrikes include clear images, as well as cardinal directions and exact timing. Earlier this week, he was one of the first to identify a American B-1 bomber flying overhead, and he has faithfully tracked the warplanes since they first appeared.

A few samples of his observations and ability to keep things light as he treads the edge of a war zone:

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate