{"id":11388,"date":"2016-02-01T09:25:58","date_gmt":"2016-02-01T15:25:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=11388"},"modified":"2016-02-01T09:25:58","modified_gmt":"2016-02-01T15:25:58","slug":"crusader-corner-the-western-volunteers-fighting-isis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2016\/02\/01\/crusader-corner-the-western-volunteers-fighting-isis\/","title":{"rendered":"Crusader Corner: The Western Volunteers Fighting ISIS"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"westerns\"<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people come over here thinking they\u2019re going to be Rambo. It\u2019s not like that.”<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The village had no name. Everyone who had known the name of the village was now dead or had fled. When the Kurdish peshmerga fighters had recaptured the settlement from ISIS that spring, it was so full of booby-traps that they just torched the place rather than deal with it. The town was abandoned now\u2014just somewhere for the men to come scavenge.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis one\u2019s my house,\u201d Christopher Smith grinned. The former Marine corporal gestured with his battered AK-47 toward a fire-gutted jungle-green villa. All the buildings were like that\u2014vibrant non-sequiturs of blue, yellow, purple. \u201cIt\u2019s like Super Mario World,\u201d the 25-year-old remarked.<\/p>\n

While thousands of Europeans and North Americans have joined ISIS, at least a hundred<\/a> Westerners have enlisted as fighters against the terrorist group. Compelled by reports of the Islamic State\u2019s gruesome activities, the first volunteers came in the fall of 2014. They have enrolled in a number of regional militias including the peshmerga\u2014the government-backed army of Iraqi Kurdistan under which Smith currently serves.<\/p>\n

The village we walked through was slowly turning back into desert\u2014disappearing by the truckload as its wreckage went to fortify the Mullah Abdullah frontlines two kilometers away. The end of Kurdistan is marked by a dull earthen rampart studded with the bright dreamland fragments of the nameless village. Seven hundred meters beyond, across a minefield, is the Islamic State.<\/p>\n

Two months before that day in December, Smith had been a brick mason living in Vermont with a fianc\u00e9e. That was all over now. \u201cI took the wrong bus to Miami,\u201d he joked. In fact, the American had flown to Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan, on a one-way ticket. With his military papers in hand, the veteran had walked into the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs and enlisted.<\/p>\n

Read the Remainder at The Atlantic<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cA lot of people come over here thinking they\u2019re going to be Rambo. It\u2019s not like that.” The village had no name. Everyone who had known the name of the village was now dead or had fled. When the Kurdish peshmerga fighters had recaptured the settlement from ISIS that spring, it was so full of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1704,2574,74,2004,1247,2413,2726,2933,2990,1860,272,1898],"tags":[2049,4262,1778,4263,1083,2278,4264],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11388"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11388\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}