After Sipan

Rastinews — Sami Şeyhmus Heso was 26. He served in the Haseke Brigade of the Syrian army. He was abducted, beheaded, and his body was shot afterward. He leaves behind not only a grieving family, but a people forced once again to confront the horrors of the past.

Sami's story carries a dignity too heavy for words, and lands like a slap in the face, an unwelcome reminder. His brothers Hüseyin and Sipan were killed fighting ISIS; Sami had taken his brother Sipan's name as his nom de guerre. Their parents are already dead. The surviving siblings are now facing mourning for the third time under the same roof.

"They took him and killed him. Whatever we do now, he won't come back," his sister said through tears. It is not the cry of one sibling alone. It is the shared lament of a people who for years have lost their children to abductions, executions, mass graves and battlefields.

The killing has reopened a wound that has never closed in Kurdish memory. Images of ISIS's brutality in Kobanî, Shengal (Sinjar) and Hasakah resurfaced. It showed once again that the mindset behind those atrocities — abducting people over their identity, beheading them, enslaving women, turning cities into killing fields — has not fully disappeared.

ISIS is not just the name of an organization; it is the most savage expression of a mindset that treats difference as an enemy. That mindset sometimes appears under an organization's flag, sometimes behind a uniform, sometimes between the lines of a draft signed in a government building. When it came as an armed militia, its name was ISIS. Today the same exclusionary, single-identity reflex can hide behind a decree titled "integration," a capitulation imposed in the name of "stability," or a loss of status packaged as "peace." The name and the costume change; the substance does not: the same logic that treats those who are different as a threat, turns rights into a bargaining chip, and leaves security to the mercy of a single center.

That is why Sami's killer is not one person or one organization. Whatever its name — ISIS, a militia, or an official authority — any structure that refuses to see Kurds, Yazidis, Alevis or Druze as agents with a say over their own future carries this same mindset. Names and balances of power may change, but as long as perpetrators go unpunished, killings go uninvestigated, and the security of peoples remains a matter for negotiation, the danger will persist.

Security cannot rest on Damascus's word

Sami's killing shows once again, to Kurds, Alevis, Druze, Yazidis, Assyrians and Armenians across the region, a hard truth: no people can entrust its safety to promises from Damascus, or to the shifting calculations of regional and international powers.

Alliances in this region have shifted again and again. Promises have been forgotten; pledges of protection have been sacrificed to political bargaining. The price has almost always been paid by peoples left defenseless.

The self-defense referred to here is not about arming peoples against one another. It means a democratic, rule-of-law, community-monitored approach to security — a shared will to protect life, running from neighborhood early-warning networks to local security structures, from documenting crimes to organizing women, from cross-community solidarity to independent investigative mechanisms. What must be built is an order in which no community holds power over another, and security is not left to the monopoly of a single center.

A common will against a common threat

The security of Kurds cannot be separated from that of Alevis, Druze and Yazidis. Leaving one people isolated makes it easier for the next to be targeted. History has already proven wrong those who stayed silent when Yazidis were targeted in Shengal, and those who saw the siege of Kobanî as a Kurdish problem alone. What is needed today is not unity born of fear, but democratic solidarity built on equal citizenship, mutual trust and shared life.

The killing of Sami Şeyhmus Heso must be investigated in full. Those responsible, and anyone who assisted them, must be brought before an independent judiciary. The investigation must not be left hostage to political calculations — every killing that goes unpunished emboldens the next attack.

Sami will not return. Neither will his brothers Hüseyin and Sipan. But mourning them is not enough. Remembering them means demanding justice, deepening solidarity, and building the democratic security order that will prevent new massacres.

Rojava is in mourning for Sipan today. That mourning must become a will that brings peoples together against a common threat, rather than driving them apart. Because in this region, protecting life does not depend on waiting for the mercy of outside powers — it depends on peoples trusting one another, organizing, and having a say over their own future.