I am Italian. I fought beside the Kurds. I was at the siege of Kobani and in the liberation of Raqqa. I am ashamed of my country. Italy’s contribution to the war against ISIS was to put its own volunteers on trial: Italians who served beside the Kurdish forces, the ground troops of the coalition that Rome belongs to. Under the flag of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, twelve thousand men and women died to see ISIS defeated. At the table where the victory is now discussed, none of them has a seat. There is no Kurd, no Arab, no Assyrian, no Armenian, no Yazidi. Only states are admitted, and some of them earned their chair by adding a flag and a name to the coalition’s letterhead. During the siege of Kobani, Azad picked up the phone, joking, and pretended to call Obama. “Thank you, Obama, for the support,” he said. He fell less than a month later. If only he could see what happened here later. The same city, under siege again. Cut off from electricity, water, phone lines. Children dying of cold in the dead of winter. A hundred and fifty thousand civilians trapped again. And the world let it happen. They called it a “security operation,” because now ISIS wore a suit. Kurdish blood was cheap, and it bought something. It kept the bombs from going off in European capitals. Then the people who were paid for in that blood found a new man in Damascus, one willing to deal, and they went to him. I can’t prove what was said in those rooms. I can read the outcome: the oil fields, the border crossings and the institutions passed to Damascus, and the autonomy my comrades died for was dissolved. The Kurds are forgotten. Their cause is shelved, and the word “democracy” is spoken in Europe’s capitals only about places that suit them. I don’t regret fighting for autonomy. I don’t regret fighting for Kurdistan. But I wish I could take back every bullet I fired that may have stopped a plot to blow up a European capital. Europe did not deserve them.