Once they were heroes. From 2014 on, hundreds of U.S. and international volunteers travelled to Syrian Kurdistan to join Kurdish-led forces battling the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS. As they helped turn the tide and drive ISIS out of their one-time capital Raqqa — backed by U.S. airstrikes and limited ground support — young Leftists and U.S. military veterans were martyred side-by-side under the antifascist flag.
Sensationalist and sexed-up media coverage accompanied them into battle. Western media were enthralled by the spectacle of idealistic young North Americans fighting alongside Kurdish women in a life-or-death struggle against a resurgent strain of authoritarian Islamism. Jake Gyllenhaal and Hillary Clinton got behind movie projects documenting their role in an international conflict that has drawn comparisons to the role of foreign fighters battling fascism in the Spanish Civil War.
A decade later, Syria’s Kurdish-led forces have been abandoned by their one-time Western allies, and the global press no longer cares about the “heroes” of the ISIS war. The “Anarchists vs. ISIS” film never materialized. Instead, the volunteers returned home to face struggles familiar to veterans of other conflicts, including depression, PTSD and suicide. Instead of offering institutional support, the U.S., U.K. and European governments surveil and harass the returning volunteers at Turkey’s behest.
At least 10 international volunteers in Syrian Kurdistan have killed themselves in recent years, according to surviving veterans. In taking their own lives, vets like Americans Connor Lee-Kawanishi and Kevin Howard, Canadian Alex Moreau and Briton Jamie Janson joined more than 60 foreign volunteers who lost their lives on the battlefield to ISIS sniper fire and Turkish airstrikes. Their deaths have inspired fellow international veterans with the Syrian Kurdish forces to organize mutual aid and demand better treatment from the U.S. and other governments. “We don’t get medals, we don’t get recognition,” says surviving U.K. veteran Dersim Agir. “But we do suffer all the downsides of being in a war-zone.”
The main obstacle between these veterans and fair treatment is President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey. The Ankara government doesn’t care that the Kurds removed the ISIS threat from Turkey’s border and saved the Yazidi minority from genocide; it sees the women-led Syrian Kurdish forces as terrorists linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Turkish authorities are so determined to destroy the progressive Kurdish-led region known as “Rojava” that its proxy militias have recruited and sheltered dozens of former ISIS members, prompting U.S. sanctions. In general, however, Washington has given their NATO ally a green light. Ankara is permitted to pummel the West’s one-time Kurdish allies with artillery and air strikes that target humanitarian infrastructure, refugee camps and even prisons housing thousands of captive ISIS members. As a consequence, a number of captured Islamist militants have escaped.
The West’s willingness to sacrifice their former democratic ally in the region is reflected in the harsh treatment meted out to the volunteers. In the U.S., veterans who fought for the multi-ethnic, Kurdish-led forces — the official frontline partners of the U.S.-led “International Coalition to Defeat ISIS” — suffer FBI home visits, interrogations at airports and placement on No-Fly lists. In the U.K., authorities have used a range of legal mechanisms under the country’s controversial Terrorism Act to target, detain and prosecute former volunteers, often seeking hefty jail sentences. Under the law, those suspected of terror offenses can be detained without charge at the border, questioned without the right to silence, and forced under threat of imprisonment to surrender phone passwords.
At least 10 international volunteers in Syrian Kurdistan have killed themselves in recent years.
Dersim Agir, a 37-year-old U.K.-born Kurd who volunteered as a combat medic, was detained upon arrival at Luton airport when he travelled back to the U.K. to attend the funeral of another U.K. volunteer, Jac Holmes, who was killed clearing ISIS landmines in Raqqa. “As soon as I landed, I was escorted out of the plane by four armed officers,” Agir recalls. It took months for the police to confirm that “nothing [he] had done was illegal.”
Jon Allen, from the U.K.’s Kurdistan Solidarity Network, describes these policies as a “symptom of the close relationship between the British and Turkish states.” A further battery of “intimidation tactics,” he says, are used to target international volunteers and their supporters. This includes travel bans, restrictive bail conditions, confiscation of phones and computers, and armed raids on home and work addresses. “The intended effect is to isolate, to break down networks. People feel they are being watched, so should stay away from comrades because it might put them in danger. It carries a huge toll for people’s mental health,” he says.
Another ex-volunteer, Josh Schooler, lost his job at a Manchester school following a raid by armed police. While remaining politically active, he later died of a drug overdose, a fate met by multiple returning veterans. Although British judges have repeatedly thrown these cases out, surviving veterans and legal campaigners say the prosecutions exact heavy personal, emotional and financial tolls.
When U.K. volunteer Jamie Janson killed himself in 2019, he was under investigation following an arrest under Section 5 of the U.K.’s Terrorism Act, for “helping to prepare an act of terrorism.” Volunteer Dan Burke spent eight months on remand in U.K. jail, on suspicion of the same offense, only to be released without ever facing trial. Fellow volunteer Dan Newey saw his brother and father arrested on terror charges for sending him $200 while he was holidaying in Barcelona, en route to Kurdistan.
These policies have impacted the lives of civilian volunteers as well as combatants. The author of this piece was held in a Greek jail for two months and banned from all European territory as a result of his journalism work in Rojava. Medical volunteers, ecological and women’s activists are all routinely harassed at the border and prevented from traveling; a number of these civilian volunteers have also taken their own lives upon return. Allen, of the Kurdistan Solidarity Network, was arrested, bailed and forced to report three times weekly to a police station simply for supporting an ecological delegation travelling to Rojava.
“We were fighting a war in the U.K.’s interest,” says Agir, who hauled hundreds of casualties out of rubble in Syria. “I’d like my government to stop treating us like we’re the enemy.”
State persecution compounds the isolation experienced by volunteers after returning to civilian life in the west. Life in the revolutionary Kurdish movement is marked by a profound spirit of common struggle and 24-hour communal living. Though many volunteers struggle initially with the discipline and alien social standards of living and fighting in Kurdistan, they find it even harder to readjust after leaving it. “I miss being part of a collective endeavor, that feeling of living for something bigger than yourself,” says Agir. “In London, people seem dead behind the eyes.”
In the U.K. and Europe, the reentry of volunteers is assisted by Kurdish diaspora populations, left-wing support networks and active solidarity organizations. “I felt alone, isolated, deprived of meaning and sociality upon returning,” says Italian volunteer Agit Berneri, 35. “It made a big difference for me to keep in touch with the hevals [Kurdish comrades] at times of distress.”
Ex-volunteers in the U.S., however, navigate reentry without such support. Geographically distant from one another, many U.S. volunteers were prior veterans of the U.S. Army, attracted more by the chance to battle ISIS than any sympathy with the Kurdish movement’s left-wing ideology. Without solidarity networks, they often slip through the cracks upon their return.
“I’d like my government to stop treating us like we’re the enemy.”
Connor Lee-Kawanishi’s recent death, for example, went unnoticed by the volunteer community for almost a year, prompting distress and fury once the news reached his former comrades-in-arms. “He appeared way more stable and psychologically strong than most of us,” recalls Bernieri, who met Lee-Kawanishi in Syria. “Most of us didn’t even know he was back to the U.S.”
Lee-Kawanishi was 22 when he took his own life on Oct. 20, 2021. He’d spent four years on the frontlines of the Kurds’ existential struggle against ISIS and Turkey. His mother, Choony, now battling Stage 4 cancer, recalls that her teenage son was “very sensitive to justice” and emerged from a spell of teenage depression in 2016 to find meaning and direction in the Kurdish struggle for democracy. Like many volunteers in Rojava, he experienced a combination of being “pulled” by the Kurdish struggle to establish a women-led, direct-democratic, multi-ethnic democracy, and being “pushed” away from individualistic life in Western societies.
U.S. volunteer Harry Thompson, now 30, met Lee-Kawanishi immediately following his own arrival in the Middle East. He was struck by the younger man’s maturity and grasp of the complex situation on the ground. “I could not have asked for a better companion, a warrior to look up to, a friend I could talk to about anything,” says Thompson. Lee-Kawanishi distinguished himself by the duration and fullness of his commitment, serving on virtually every frontline with local units and also helping fellow volunteers with his language skills and insights into local culture. Amid the intense camaraderie of conflict and long spells of downtime, Thompson and Lee-Kawanishi came to share everything: a guilty love for Taylor Swift, jokes over Lee-Kawanishi ’s irritatingly rapid acquisition of both the Kurdish and Arabic languages and heartfelt embraces after surviving a battle. Most volunteers stay in the conflict zone for six to 18 months; Lee-Kawanishi stayed four years, witnessing ISIS’ final defeat in 2019, the withdrawal of U.S. support under then-President Donald Trump and Turkey’s subsequent war of ethnic cleansing against the Syrian Kurds and their allies.
The emotional intensity of his years on the frontlines made it difficult for Lee-Kawanishi to adjust back home in New York. Upon his return, the FBI paid multiple visits to his home, further darkening an already difficult reentry process.
“After the first two weeks [back home], he spiralled out of control, losing hope and purpose,” his mother recalls. “We didn’t have health insurance for him, and [were] waiting for that until we could get him to see a psychiatrist for medication and therapy. None of the help we were waiting for came to fruition.”
The FBI would show up again after his death, not to apologize, but to interrogate his sister.
The experience of the international volunteers contrasts sharply with the official respect and material support afforded to U.S. veterans of other foreign wars. River O’Mahoney Hagg, 49, has seen both sides of the story, having served with the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan before volunteering combat in Syria. He thought he was well prepared for Rojava, but the experience left him with severe PTSD.
“Back home, I lost everything — my family, job, and two houses. I was homeless for about eight months,” he recalls, describing a drunk-driving incident as a “passive suicide attempt.” As a disabled veteran of the U.S. Navy, Hagg was court-ordered to take anger management classes, as well as undergo government-provided psychiatric counseling. His life is now back on track in Hawaii, where is working toward a degree and living with his 14-year-old daughter. “I am a testament to the power of counseling and the desire to overcome disabilities,” Hagg says. “[But] veterans from Rojava do not have the same access to resources.”
Surviving volunteers have begun organizing to provide those resources themselves, rather than waiting around for help from Western governments. “There is no happy ending to this story,” says Thompson. “Our duty is to speak their names, keep their images tacked to our walls — and call out our society for not taking care of people who tried to make the world a better place.”
“We fought for the values of democracy and women’s rights with the backing of western governments. We don’t deserve to be treated as suspects.”
Upon hearing the news of Lee-Kawanishi’s suicide, Agir, the U.K.-born Kurdish veteran, set up a support network for former volunteers. “We didn’t know there was something wrong [with Lee-Kawanishi] until we heard he had taken his life. If we’d only stayed in touch, helped with day-to-day-things, if there was just some connection to the community…” he says, his voice trailing off. Agir’s informal group holds regular cross-continental calls for veterans and provides a space for psychological and practical support. In the U.K., the Kurdistan Solidarity Network works with veterans to provide a concrete range of financial, legal and practical support.
As these fragile networks struggle to commemorate the dead and fight for the living, governments could take concrete steps to offer the veterans fair treatment, beginning with pushing back against Turkish influence detrimental to their own interests. Kurdish representatives have long urged Washington, London, and international bodies to remove Kurdish organizations from terror lists and push Ankara to reopen peace talks with the Kurdish movement. Such a political recalibration seems more distant than ever, but is necessary to release anti-ISIS veterans from unjust lifetime sentences of surveillance and harassment. Until then, Rojava remains the one place where the international veterans are afforded their just place of honor, their photos displayed in gardens and graveyards.
“We didn’t go to Syria expecting glory or payment,” says Thompson, the U.S. volunteer. “But we fought for the values of democracy and women’s rights with the backing of western governments. We don’t deserve to be treated as suspects.”
The Lee-Kawanishi family has a fundraiser online here. The names of some surviving veterans have been changed at their request.
The post From Heroes to Suspects: The Betrayal of the Anti-ISIS International Brigade appeared first on Truthdig.
