For Lorenzo Orsetti

The One Who Did Not Die for War, but for the Struggle in the Name of Humanity

For the anniversary of the martyrdom of Lorenzo Orsetti, Ş. Tekoşer Piling, Italian martyr of the Rojava Revolution, we publish the letter of an Indonesian friend, that found hope and inspiration in the struggle of Lorenzo. Lorenzo fell on 18th March 2019 in the struggle against ISIS, and his revolutionary approach to life, that arrived to us through his writings and video messages, became an inspiration to young people in Italy and beyond.

Ş. Tekoşer Piling

I first encountered you not through the news or the newspapers, but through a simple post on an anarchist website—without ornament or embellishment, just the quiet story of a fighter from Florence who chose to leave the comfort of his home to stand on the front line against the brutality of ISIS in Rojava.

Then I saw the video of your funeral, shared by Tekosîna Anarsîst — the Anarchist Struggle (TA). Your journey home was not accompanied by a rigid military ceremony or by the waving flags of a State, but by the banners of popular organizations, surrounded by hundreds of faces: Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Yazidis, Turkmen, all mourning together, calling you heval, brother, şehîd namirin—the martyr who never dies.

In a desert so often labeled “foreign” by the West, you were embraced as part of the family by its peoples. It was no coincidence. It was the fruit of a life lived with honesty, just as you once said: “Every storm begins with a single drop.”

As an anarcho-communist from a nation once crushed under the boots of Suharto’s “New Order”—where state violence was called “development” and freedom was labeled “a threat”—and now, watching history repeat itself as militarism rises again, remembering you rekindles something within me. In you I saw something rare: you showed that internationalism is not just a slogan. It is a shared hope that guides us all. Together with your internationalist comrades, you breathed life into its truest meaning.

You proved that a young European could live in the Middle East not to conquer, but to learn; to protect and in turn be protected; to build together what we call humanity and democratic civilization.

Your values—and those of your comrades—antimilitarism, antifascism, anticapitalism—are bridges. Not only between Italy and Rojava, but among all of us who reject a world divided between rulers and ruled. Here we are building ties with anticapitalist socialists from many traditions—anarchists, libertarian Marxists, autonomous communists, Marxist-Leninists—and in your dream we see our own: a world without oppressive nation-states, without markets that trade lives like data and commodities, without wars that benefit only arms dealers and banks. A world in which communes—not capital or power—shape our lives. The world you fought for until your last breath.

Lorenzo, here as well—in Indonesia, in Southeast Asia, across the Global South—we are planting those same seeds, despite repression, even in scarcity, still organizing underground. And every time we grow tired, we remember: somewhere, a young Italian, together with hundreds like him, chose to die for his convictions—not for a flag, not for glory, but for people who were not even his family.

Your spirit flows through every discussion we have had in recent years, inspired by the paradigm developed by our Kurdish comrades; through every small book we publish; through every clandestine political education session we organize.

You remind us that this struggle is not only about resistance to power. It is about love—radical love, without borders, unconditional.

¡Hasta siempre, heval Lorenzo!

Your dream is our oxygen.

And we will not stop—not until our last breath has also been given.

Bone, 18.03.2025