Friday, March 6, 2015

Who Are The Foreign Fighters Taking On The Islamic State?

Who Are The Foreign Fighters Taking On The Islamic State?


By Richard Spencer
March 4, 2015                                
Before supper in their barracks every evening, Sunni Muslim soldiers of the YPG militia, sworn enemies of the Islamic State (Isil), pause while an American born-again Christian says his prayers. Once Jordan Matson has finished saying his one-man grace, the hardened fighting force of Syrian Kurds, now famed for their victory in Kobane, their women warriors and the rescue of the Yazidis from atop Mount Sinjar last summer, tuck in. As night falls, they head out to their trenches and outposts, taking turns on guard duty with other foreigners like Matson, watching for any movement from the jihadists’ lines beyond.
 Jordan Matson, with his Midwestern faith, chequered headscarf and goatee beard, adds a touch of wild Hollywood glamour to a war that is already reminiscent of the film Mad Max. One side, Isil, is formed of bands of bloodthirsty nihilists, who advertise themselves with gruesome public executions and roam across the desert in convoys of pickup trucks and makeshift suicide truck bombs welded together with scrap metal sheeting. On the other side Brits, Americans and other young men are piling in to defend what they see as civilisation itself.
“These are people with one goal – to fight Daesh,” Alan Duncan, a former British soldier now training an Assyrian Christian group allied to the Kurdish forces in northern Iraq, told me from the Kurdish city of Dohuk yesterday. Daesh is the universal term in the Middle East for Isil, the acronym of its name in Arabic.
Another former soldier, Konstandinos Erik Scurfield, earlier this week became the first Briton to die fighting Isil for the Kurdish cause. He was holed up alongside the YPG in Al-Hol, in north-eastern Syria – the country’s main oil-producing region which, during the past four years, has been fought over by the Kurds, Isil, the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad and the al-Qaeda-linked group, Jabhat al-Nusra. The current battle, in which Scurfield died, is an attempt to capitalise on Isil’s flight from Kobane to the west .
Al-Hol was one of a number of towns along the banks of the Euphrates where, until recently, Isil had begun to feel comfortably ensconced. It was there that only last month they carried out one of their trademark public punishments, shooting and then crucifying four men they accused of “banditry”.
The “foreign fighters” who have joined in these battles, like Scurfield and Alan Duncan, are an eclectic bunch, united only in their hatred of such horrors. They are far more diverse, in fact, than the alienated, disenchanted Muslim boys who have flocked from London, Portsmouth, Paris and Amsterdam to join the ranks of Isil.
Mr Duncan, who served 6 years with the Royal Irish Regiment in Ulster and found he could succeed, but not really settle, in his second career installing double glazing, is perhaps the most obvious example of the hardened ex-squaddie. Dismissive of those he doesn’t take to, contemptuous of Isil’s “murdering bastards”, he painted a black-and-white view of his moral universe when we spoke earlier this year. Daesh had to be fought like the IRA had to be fought, he said; he had what he admitted was a “rather conservative” view of politics.
He couldn’t understand why Britain and the West more generally had, in his view, encouraged the jihadists to get out of hand, and why they weren’t doing more now to stop them. The British Government, he said yesterday, was trying to stop people like him joining the Kurdish army, or Peshmerga. “Screw them,” was his response. “We are here for the Kurds, not our government.”
Mr Scurfield, by contrast, seems to have been a bit more of a philosopher. On his Facebook page he linked to Guardian articles about the Elgin Marbles and made other references to the Greek heritage he inherited from his mother. In a clever reference to his future plans, a prophecy even of his death, he had chosen as his profile picture the famous Orientalist portrait by Thomas Phillips of Lord Byron, the poet who died while volunteering to fight for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire.
These men’s professed idealism is a far cry from an even more bloodthirsty era, when ex-British soldiers signed up as mercenaries in Africa’s civil wars. From the Sixties onwards, guns-for-hire joined revolutions – or prevented them – acquiring a mixed reputation as adventurers, thugs and agents of murky CIA plots, not helped by films like The Wild Geese, which sought to show them in a good light, but made the viewer ask what they were doing there in the first place.
The nadir of that era came when another former British soldier of Greek ethnic origin, Costas Georgiou, went berserk while working for the Western-backed anti-Marxist revolutionaries of Angola, killing a large number of captive soldiers. He was himself executed after being caught by the regime.
That remains, now, the Government’s worst fear: that a Briton either gets caught committing some atrocity himself, or is captured and becomes the star of some new videoed Isil monstrosity. Having refused to countenance a ransom for aid workers, it is unlikely Downing Street would lift a finger for men who had taken up arms. There are also claims that the Ministry of Defence had tried to intervene with Scurfield’s family – or even that he had been a Royal Marine at all, although it is thought he served with 45 Commando.
The big difference with such modern gunslingers is that they are not in it for the money. Most are paying their own way, some via fundraising websites. Some are not ex-military – those who have been and come back describe a motley band of retired teachers, surfer dudes and, in perhaps the best-known case, a man called Matthew Van Dyke, a journalist who became smitten with the “cause of freedom” and took up arms first in Libya, then Syria and now Iraq.
Perhaps as a result the Kurdish authorities, at least in Iraqi Kurdistan, are now becoming concerned, discouraging the Peshmerga from taking volunteers. Even the YPG is weeding out those who it thinks are not up to the task, after some unfortunate experiences with men who disappeared when the fighting got too hot.
Some volunteers are particularly concerned about the heavily religious “war of civilisations” discourse of their brothers-in-arms – people like Brett Royale, who fought with the Americans in Iraq in 2007 and has returned to join an Assyrian Christian militia there, describing himself as a “crusader”. The Kurds and the Assyrians, though largely Sunni Muslim and Christian respectively, prefer to emphasise that they are fighting very much for a secular, not a religious, identity.
Jordan Matson, however, is accepted. In fact, he has become the de facto leader of the YPG’s international brigade (sometimes known as the Lions of Rojava, after a Kurdish region) and his fellow fighters are happy to respect his prayers. But most have the hearty lack of religion of Tommy Atkinses throughout the ages. There was little mention of Christ in the tributes to the Australian Ashley Johnston, the first Westerner to be killed last week.
For most of these men, their idealism is of the modern era, a contrast to the seventh-century millenarianism of the jihadists they face. Last September, before he headed off to his personal war, Kostas Scurfield posted this on his Facebook page: “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?” These are the last words of Sophie Scholl, a young member of the German anti-Nazi resistance group White Rose, who had distributed leaflets condemning the Third Reich’s war. Shortly after she uttered them, she was led out to her execution, and beheaded.
Source:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/11450359/Who-are-the-foreign-fighters-taking-on-the-Islamic-State.html

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