A 26-year-old British woman who travelled to Syria to fight in an all-female unit had insisted she ‘did not regret it for a second’ in a chilling video filmed before her death.
Anna Campbell left her home in Lewes, East Sussex, in 2017 to journey to Rojava to join the YPJ, or Women’s Protection Units, in the fight against Islamic State.
Eight months after the activist arrived in Syria with no military background, she went to the front line to fight – but was killed by a Turkish air strike only weeks later.
Now, a new BBC programme has revealed she spoke of a ‘revolution’ in an interview for a documentary in a YPJ commune in Rojava as she learned Kurdish and trained.
Dirk Campbell, 67, holds a portrait of his late daughter Anna, with soldiers the YPJ, an all-female brigade of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG)
Sitting in front of a row of guns, she explained why she had travelled to Syria, saying: ‘I never thought I could be someone who could participate in a revolution here.
‘I want to know that it’s real. As anarchists, we’re always told you’re just idealists, that could never happen, that could never work.
Miss Campbell is a British woman who was a fighter with the Kurdish female militia
‘I feel like this is really important and amazing and I’m going to learn a lot, and I don’t regret it for a second.’
The film also hears from the private schoolgirl’s father Dirk Campbell, who has visited soldiers from the YPJ and said he and other relatives begged her not to travel to the war-torn country.
Miss Campbell, who died in March last year, was the British woman to die fighting with Kurdish forces in Syria and the eighth Briton to have died in the country.
She flew to Syria via Lebanon in 2017 where she joined the YPJ, an all-female brigade of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).
The units have about 50,000 Kurdish men and women fighting against Isis in the north of the country.
Mr Campbell, who begged Anna not to travel to the war-torn state, is pictured with YPJ soldiers
Mr Campbell is pictured with Nisrin Abdollah, commander of the YPJ Diplomatic
Conflict between Turkey and Kurdish groups had been inflamed and in the week of Miss Campbell’s death, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the country’s military had captured the town centre of Afrin, which was previously controlled by the YPG.
Miss Campbell is pictured aged 12 in 2003
Speaking about her death on ITV’s This Morning ahead of the BBC documentary due to air tomorrow night, Mr Campbell, 67, said: ‘One doesn’t really come to terms with a thing like that.
‘I should have done more. She wouldn’t take no for an answer, she was that tough.
‘All members of her family and friends said ‘Please don’t do this, it’s a really bad idea, it’s really dangerous’ but I’d been in enough discussions with her to know when arguing was futile. Also, I didn’t want to disrespect her opinion.
‘I thought what she was doing was important enough for her that I could support her by feeling proud so that she didn’t feel like she was out on a limb on her own.’
Miss Campbell was detained by police in September 2013 at an anti-fascism protest in London
Earlier this year Mr Campbell, of Lewes, East Sussex, took his second trip to Syria and discovered she kept a diary when he recovered her belongings which was an almost ‘day-to-day transcript’ of her experience out there.
In May 2018 he accused the Government of ‘back-pedalling’ amid his attempts to find a way to bring her body home over fears it would be left to rot on the battlefield in Afrin.
He said: ‘She was an amazing woman. Full of life, full of a sort of sense of importance of what she could contribute to life.
‘She was about justice, she was about the moral issues. Very resolute (in) whatever she decided to do.’
Anna: The Woman Who Went To Fight Isis airs on BBC Two at 9.30pm tomorrow