How did Anna Campbell end up dead in Syria?

Beyond Today

BBC

News

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2019

⏱️ 20 minutes

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Summary

In 2018 Anna Campbell’s father Dirk received the news that his 26 year-old daughter had died fighting in Syria. Up until that moment he didn’t know what she was involved with. Depending on who you speak to she was idealistic, brave, naive, or foolish. In this episode we speak to Dirk Campbell and the BBC’s Marina Parker who have been piecing together her journey from defending bees in the playground to fighting on the front line. We explore why a young British woman would be prepared to die for the Kurdish cause and what her death symbolises for her supporters. You can watch the full film Anna: The Woman Who Went to Fight ISIS here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006h6x Producers: Lucy Hancock and Alicia Burrell Editor: John Shields

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:06.6	Hello. Hello.
0:07.4	Welcome to Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4.
0:10.2	I'm Matthew Price.
0:11.2	Every day we ask one big question about one big story.
0:17.0	Today, how did Anna Campbell end up dead in Syria?
0:27.0	I guess at some point in all our lives we decide we want to change the world and then most of us at least don't follow through.
0:40.0	My name is Helin Kalaqhoch. My name from before was Anna Campbell.
0:45.0	Anna Campbell died fighting to change it.
0:49.0	She grew up in the English countryside in a well-off family. She ended her life with the Kurdish resistance in
0:56.7	Rahava in Syria. Now depending on who you speak to she was idealistic, brave, naive, or even foolish.
1:07.0	Until the day someone came to tell her dad, Dirk Campbell, that Anna had died in an air strike.
1:13.8	He had no idea what she was involved with.
1:17.8	Anna was a very intense bookish child.
1:22.2	She was very creative, imaginative. She used to be the ringleader of the children,
1:27.0	her two younger siblings, particularly. And she was always creating detective stories or treasure hunts which were really elaborate.
1:39.0	They grew up in the countryside.
1:41.0	So they were out in nature most days in the fine weather.
1:46.0	And I think she grew up with a kind of thirst for information, a thirst for knowledge, but also a thirst for justice.
1:57.0	She had a very strong sense of the kind of need for the vulnerable and weak with which she identified because she wasn't physically strong
2:08.0	It's very very tough and acute mentally but yeah she had this kind of which I think she got from her mother more than me a sense of writing wrongs and
2:21.0	to correcting injustices or fighting for justice.
	...

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