The Team House - Fighting ISIS with the Kurdish YPG | John Foxx and Dr. Till Paasche | Ep. 169

Episode Date: October 15, 2022

A unique assessment of American military involvement in Syria, written by three very different authors who between them participated in all large Kurdish operations between late 2014 and mid-2016, experiencing first-hand the impact America had on the battlefield. With America’s War on Terror and the subsequent democracy experiments in Afghanistan and Iraq having turned into geopolitical disasters, the US military campaign in alliance with the Kurdish forces in Syria remains a rare success story. Considering the overwhelming military victory, the functioning Kurdish civilian governing structures that followed the fighting, the extremely light military footprint and the strong link to Kurdish partners, many political analysts, military experts and politicians in Washington, DC, judge the intervention against ISIS in Syria as the nation’s most successful campaign since World War II. However, since neither these experts nor many journalists were on the ground during the fighting, they struggle to explain exactly how this particular operation turned into a just war. The authors, however, were there. Between the three of them, they fought for over two years with the Kurdish forces. They participated in all the large Kurdish operations against the Islamic State between late 2014 and mid-2016. They endured muddy archaic trench warfare, witnessed the first waves of decisive US and British airstrikes against ISIS, and experienced the impact America had on the battlefield. Later, when American, British and French Special Forces were deployed at the front lines, the authors worked closely with those teams when they evacuated hundreds of wounded from the battlefield together. Based on the authors' unique insights, this book analyses America’s war in Syria and structures the intervention into different phases including the secretive build up and the ultimate destruction of the ISIS Caliphate. Today's Sponsor: Mad Rabbit Tattoo https://www.MADRABBIT.com/team They’ve preserved over 1.5 MILLION tattoos and right now, they’ve got an exclusive offer just for The Team house Project listeners. If you go to MadRabbit.com/team and use promo code Team you’ll receive 25% off. Take care of those tats! 👇 https://www.MADRABBIT.com/team To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month  -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests -Ad Free audio feed Subscribe to our Patreon! 👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch:  https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media:  The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: 👇 [e-mail] #ypg #syriaBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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And if you're going to give us a not-so-good review, why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House, with your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, guys, welcome to episode 169 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy. God damn it. Here with Dave Park. Today we are talking to John Fox and Til Pash. They are the authors of America's war in Syria fighting with Kurdish anti-IS forces.

Both of these guys were foreign international volunteers in northeast Syria in the area known as Rajava. They volunteered with the YEPAJ or YPG, the people's protection units in Syria fighting ISIS. So there are three authors in this book. One is John. the other is Till, and then the third is Sean Murray, who isn't here today. But each of these guys, different countries, different national origins, different backgrounds, but you all found yourselves

fighting the same war. And so this was a really great book with a lot of different experiences and perspectives in it. I really enjoyed it. And I just want to thank both of you guys for being here with us tonight. Thanks for having us. Yeah, absolutely, man. So let's get a into first the origin story. And this is a little bit different, guys. So pardon me if it's a little difficult to coordinate because for the first time we have one guest here that's in person and one who's remote, but we'll do the best we can. So let's start with you, John. And I want to ask you a little bit about your origin story, sort of your upbringing, and what was that path that took you towards first the Marine Corps and then eventually the YPG? Okay, so the Marine Corps, I'd say

It was on my radar starting, I'd say, junior year of high school, which would have been 2007 for me. I reached a fork in the road, I guess. Everybody was taking the SAT to go to college, and I had to decide what I wanted to do. College wasn't my preference at the time, and I was really interested in what the military had to offer. So it was right about that time where I started looking at the individual branches. And of course, the Marine Corps, the dress blues, I was sold. And you're from here. You're from Brooklyn. Yes, sir. Yeah.

I went to high school in Staten Island, St. Joseph by the sea. So I made the decision. In my head, I wanted to join the Marine Corps. And then I started senior year in high school. And then coincidentally, I think it was that December, the Marine Corps recruiters set up a table at my high school. And then that weekend, I was in the recruiter's office signing my papers. And then we were the last group to us on our contracts to the U.S. military out of Brooklyn MEPs in 2007. And what was your MOS?

What was your job in the Marine Corps? I was an infantryman. Awesome. So I went to the School of Infantry in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and I graduated as an 0352, which is a tow gunner. Never got to shot a toe, never got to shoot a toe. Went to 2nd Battalion Fifth Marines in the First Marine Division. And I went to a weapons company to where we got to roll around in Humvees.

and if we were lucky, we got to have a toe on top. If not, it was mostly the 50 Cal, the 40-mic-mike, or the 240 that we rolled around with. And did you get deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq? I mean, what year was this also? I got to 2-5 in 2008. Okay. I didn't get to go to Afghanistan or to Iraq with the Marine Corps. So my battalion, we were...

In 2009, we did our second mew in a row for the battalion. It was my first mew. So we flew over to Okinawa, Japan, and then we hopped on a ship, and then we floated around Southeast Asia and trained with fellow NATO forces. And then we did the same thing again the next year. Okay. And so I got out of the Marine Corps without a combat deployment. Did, like, were you disappointed by that when you were in the Marine Corps,

as an infant frame yeah especially in that time frame extremely yeah yeah i get it and so a few years go by um and this whole ISIS thing starts kicking up in the middle east so we're looking at what 2000 okay so Syria goes down in 2012 13 14 you're seeing ISIS sweep across the middle east what's going through your head at that point um to be quite honest uh starting to 2012, I think I was monitoring all of the conflicts around the world. In the Arab Spring, I'd say was pretty fresh from what I remember. I think my first semester in college in fall 2012, we were discussing Turkey and Syria at the time. And so I was monitoring all the conflicts and honestly looking for a way to find a way for myself to be involved.

And then I was monitoring Syria and the YPGI saw that Peshmerga as well at the time. And I was monitoring that very closely. And then sure enough, the name Jordan Mattson and the headline accompanying his name popped up. You know, American makes his way to Syrian front lines. So I reached out to him on social media and asked him how we did it, how we can join and help. how can we contribute to the cause and then i believe the y pg at the time uh they were sorting out their own uh facebook page to where they could um accommodate foreigners i met jordan over there yes yeah i hope he's doing well wherever he is today um i heard haven't heard from him in a while

i believe last i heard from him he was in sweden doing very well i think he has his son good good i'm glad to yeah and so you connected with jordan he kind of lets you know in on like hey here's how it works. This is how you get over to Syria and join up with the YPG. And you just took the plunge. Yes. He connected me with their Facebook page. I contacted them. And it was oddly vague. It was you show up to Sulamania Airport in Iraq and one of us will pick you up from the outside once you get through customs. That didn't happen with me. I got through customs. I was questioned, of course. It was, I suppose, maybe out of the ordinary for them at first during that time.

And eventually I was able to hop into a cab, take it to a hotel where I would log on to the Wi-Fi and then contact the Wi-BG and say, hey, nobody picked me up. I'm over. I'm at this hotel in Sula Mania. And then sure enough, somebody came to meet me there. So let's kick it over to Till for a moment. Till, you have a totally different background than John. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about your origins and upbringing and the path that eventually carried you over to Syria.

Yeah. Well, yeah, I'm basically the very opposite of John. I'm like born in 1980, Western Germany to the very anti-war and pacifist parents. given my by grandparents' complicity in the Second World War, there was like, you know, my parents' generation were very much anti-war. When I was like two years old, I would apparently demonstrate against the stationing of Pershing, mid-range rockets in Western Germany, all of that, from school traveling the world and then joining uni,

so very sheltered, protected life. Also very boring life, right? Growing up in the 1990s in Western suburbia, it was just incredibly boring. So yeah, I always felt that there's more out there. I've been traveling a lot, Africa, Southeast Asia, all of that. And didn't really know what to do, started studying, stayed at university, did my PhD in political geography in the UK then. And I've been jumping around as an academic post-grad,

postdoc, different universities in different European countries and it was again incredibly boring. So via some connection, I had the offer to go to Kurdistan to university. You know, I didn't have to write any grants to get research money to any of this bullshit. So I jumped at the opportunity.

I always had a, you know, I was a young punk in Germany. So I had this, I like the political underdog, which the Kurds were always in the last 100 plus years, right? So I was like the Kurds were, and there's a huge Kurdish diaspora in Germany. So the Kurds were always on my radar. I find it kind of interesting. And at the time, I was like a political geographer.

And in the northern Iraq and the Kurdish regions there, the KRG, Kurdish regional. It's under the administration of the Kurdistan regional government, they offered me a position at a university. do whatever I wanted. I did a bit of teaching and then did my research on security in the region. You know, I would go to, and that was all pre-ISIS still. I would go to Kirkuk, look at the, look at the tensions with the Iraqi government. I would take the taxi up to Kandel Mountains to see PKK, do some interviews with them, just to, you know, to understand the region, write papers publish. And then ISIS came and kind of changed.

everything, right? The Kurdistan region in Iraq, prior Isis, was like going up. There was like boom, there was new oil fields discovered, a lot of westerners, a lot of American oil companies there. It was kind of some of the last massive onshore oil fields easily accessible on those Kurdish mountains. Saddam could never get there because of the Kurdish resistance, but now it was like fair game. So it was like a bit of a wild west, the new Gulf, and then ISIS came and changed everything from one day to another really, getting into Mosul. And that, yeah, that really changed everything. And I kind of got sucked into the conflict bit by bit by bit. And I went to Rajava, Syria, to see what's going on there, who are the Yeppig?

what are they doing? What is the civil administration like? And I remember one of these research trips, I would sit in the book, right? I sit in this camp of this Yazidi family. And just a couple of days before, they made it out of Schengal that was surrounded by Dash. And it was really like it or not, it was BKK holding a line. And all the small teams, career teams, lost their life, right? kind of covering the treat of the Yazidis on this one high mountain and the otherwise flat desert.

And then it was Yeppige, who fought punched their way through the ISIS lines from Syria. Really, like the risk an international incident by crossing the Syrian Iraqi border, punched a line into ISIS defenses and had like all these refugees, cannot able to get out of, get out of Shingal in Iraq into Syria and to a refugee camp there. So there was me, like sitting in the family, and it was like they just escaped genocide. It was this, I can't really describe the atmosphere. It was very depressing as a right word. It was in shock.

People were in shock, literally. And I was sitting in this tent, like people, you know, you walk through the camp, people invite you in. So the family invites me in. And the wife was heavily pregnant. She still had around in her ankle somewhere. the husband was completely shaken up. I believe one of their young sons died on the mountain of dehydration. His body was still there.

It was dark. And like in that very moment, you know, I knew, like given my German history and my, you know, talking about and not liking the idea of fascism. And, you know, that is such an important part of German history. and I knew I had to do something. I couldn't just go back and write another paper about it and be the experts when there's literally kids fighting for their survival. So I joined Yeppige. I took the taxi to the mountain camp,

said to the Havals, look, you know, this is me. I'm already, you know, I know the region fairly well. I want to join you guys. And since I have a PhD and the Kurds really like academic, amics. It was fairly easy for me to get in. Yeah. And then seven days of training, write seven rounds or five rounds with the AK on the range. And off to the front line, you go. That's that. Yeah. There's one more author of the book who's not with us today, Sean Murray. I don't know which of you would like, but would one of you like to give, you know,

a brief overview of Sean in his background? Because he's a prominent and interesting character in this book as well. Yeah. If that's okay. John, I go ahead. All right. Yeah, Sean, what a character. Irish guy grew up in London and he never, like, he was the Irish guy in London during the tail end of the IRA troubles and like the siege on London, bombings there. So as we say in this book, he was always looking for kind of identity and what does he want to be.

He isn't really Irish because Irish were the terrorists. He isn't really to the Brit to the English. he was always the Irish to the Irish. He was the English guy. And then he joined the Royal Irish Regiment, right, a kind of a military, prestigious military unit, infantry unit, born out of historic displacement, really.

Very interesting biography. And yeah, he saw ISIS during his time in the military. And with his buddies, he watched all these videos about Dash taking over checkpoints in Iraq, just willy-nilly driving through Anba, through Masul, just like they own the place, which they did at the time. And the British Army wasn't getting ready to intervene. He joined the British military, so shit like this isn't happening. And he was like a very idealistic person, like about...

Absolutely. Ideas about democracy and freedom and we should be out there at the forefront, you know, fighting a group like this. Yeah, he believed in like Fukuyama's argument of the end of history after the end of the Cold War, right? The West won, capitalism won. Everyone should celebrate that, you know, it's now like peace forever. But that wasn't the case.

And he felt that the West didn't respond or his own military, the British military who's part of, wasn't really, you know, intervening. And there's this interesting bit. People would ask him, why didn't you join the Irish military? And he would say, why would I? The Irish don't do peacekeeping missions. Well, they did in Africa, actually. It was a really quick video on Netflix video about it. but not to the extent that the British did it.

So he was like, yeah, fuck this. I joined the Brits. I want to go around and bring democracy to people. That was his idealist idea. Yeah. And then that didn't happen. And basically straight from the barracks, he went, hopped on a fly to, again, northern Iraq, Kurdistan, and joined Jepige. And we met in the mountains being smuggled in together into Syria.

So I think we kind of established your guys, the three of your past. into Syria and joining up with the YPG. To back up for a second, for some of the viewers who maybe don't know, let's talk a little bit about what the YPG was and the YPJ was, the people's protection units. You guys, feel free to pick up wherever you want here. Where do you want to start with this? Yeah, actually, I think it would be very interesting.

And we've talked about this really briefly on the show, and Jack, I know you're an expert in this, but I'm not. But can we talk about Kurdistan in general and the YPG, the P.U.K., the KDP, the Petsch, like how it all, who they were before, before ISIS, and then how it all happened? Yeah, if that's okay, John, I'll take this one. Yep. Well, the Kurds were, I mean the Kurds were fighting for a state since the end of the First World War. And the Kurds are basically, well, it roughly translates into mountain people.

And they would live in the Zagros mountain range that goes through Turkey. Iraq, Iran, and there would basically be the geopolitical losers of all the political processes going on. So when after the First World War, the Ottoman Empire was basically being broken up and had to retreat. The French and the British started structuring, especially the French and the British, started dividing up the region and the Iraq's got the state, etc., etc., The Kurds didn't. So since 100 years plus, they're fighting for, they're fighting essentially for state, but if you would talk to many Kurds, they wouldn't use the word state.

They talk about identity for the right to sing our songs, to eat our food, to dance, our dances, live our culture. Because this is all illegal in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran. like Kurds were, you know, forcefully assimilated into those nation states. And they always resisted because there were the losers, like, you know, take the Syrian Kurds. The Assad regime took, made them basically stateless. Two or three hundred thousand Kurds suddenly lost their Syrian citizenship, lost their right to go to school, see a doctor, anything. So there was this old, old, hundred year old Kurdish struggle for our time. economy. And the Kurds that like most known to the Americans would be the Iraqi ones, right?

KDP, the guy Sam Fettis worked with, for example. And so I think going back a little, we make a mistake by talk about the Kurds. They're by no means. I met homogenous groups. They're like split up. I do various different parties. And as you can see the Iranian Kurds are getting a little froggy right now, as I see. Absolutely. Absolutely, for good reasons. And like it's, yeah, and so there were always fighting for identity and fighting the Iraqi state, Saddam, the Assad, the Turkish state, the Iranian regime. But if they weren't fighting those regimes, they would fight each other.

So it's not a homogeneous group. But especially the Iraqi Kurds, they kind of, after 91, there was the uprising, then there was a crackdown by Saddam. There was a flow-fly zones. And then slowly Kurdish autonomy started establishing in northern Iraq. And that was referred to in the 90s and the golden age of Kurdistan. The Kurds got a de facto country without having a country. It's a difference between independence and autonomy.

So they had this autonomous region where they could govern their own affairs. And this was a major milestone. And then the 2003 Iraq invasion happened. And the Kurds were very close allies to the Americans, very loyal allies to the Americans. I don't think any American or British serviceman, a woman died in combat in the Kurdish region by the hands of Kurds. Very loyal fighters. And they pushed Saddam out pretty fast with the Americans and extended their autonomy. And that kind of kept going on until really ISIS suddenly appeared and reshifted the entire region and destabilized.

the entire region, including Kurdistan. And the Yazidis are technically parts of the Kurds. So yeah, there was a major destabilization, you know, in the autonomous Kurdish region, you have 4 million Kurds, and you had 2 million IDPs coming in seeking shelter. You had whole Iraqi units withdrawing into Kurdistan to seek shelter from ISIS. And from Kurdistan, a lot of the counter offenses would be launched. So Iraqi units would deploy to Kurdistan and push from there with the help of the

Peshmerga. But altogether, like, it's a very chaotic, it's a very chaotic situation. And explaining Kurdistan in five minutes is very challenging because there's so much going on. Pick up with Rajava specifically about how that's sort of like, we were talking a little bit before the show sprouted into existence during the conflict with ISIS. It was not just a counteroffensive, so to speak. It was the birth of a new nation taking place in the midst of this war. Yes, absolutely. So like I'd say, from all the parties that fought ISIS, everyone for continuing a status quo, including the Peshmerga.

They didn't fight for anything, for any new political theory. The Syrian Kurds did, though, right? They had, they wanted, they didn't fight for status quo, but they fought for something better than what they had before ISIS. They had very innovative, revolutionary political theory that comes from the PKK guerrillas and the mountains, right, the famous terrorists that fight the Turkish state. And these theories about freedom, about federalism, about breaking up the monopoly in violence and have different ethnic and religious militias securing basically different ethnic and religious villages. You know, it wasn't that the Assad regime or the Iraqi government was supposed to provide security. The Kurdish idea was that the people provide their own security because, frankly speaking, the nation,

states and the region sucked at it. So the Kurds had an idea where they basically fought to give power to other minorities, the Christians, the Yazidis, the Arabs and the alliance. And not a lot of parties in this conflict fight to give a power, right, when they win. That's a new idea. And that resonated with many people in the region, Westerners as well as locals. So Rajava has this idea gained really quick momentum. And a lot of people flocked there because a lot of leftists flocked there.

A lot of guys like John flocked there because they wanted to be part of something. And this is what many of the volunteers said bigger than themselves. And that's, you know, we wanted to be part of something that's bigger than us. And they found that in Rajava and this kind of autonomy project. where they you know the sate regime once the one's the turmoil kicked off pulled out of the kirtish areas Assad understood Kurdish theory enough to understand that by pulling out and giving up Kurdistan he's not going to jeopardize syrian territorial integrity so he understood the kurdish political theory and actually pulled out to secure

damascus and the rump state what academics have called it like to stay in power basically you know, Damascus and his Al-White strongholds. That's where all the Syrian forces retreated, before they got Iranian help, before they got his Bola to come in, before they got the Russians to come in and help. So they just pulled out overnight of the Kurdish regions, and the Kurds had to secure their borders. Because the Kurds also fight for the right to be religious, for the right to be Muslim, for the right to be Christian,

and for the right not to believe in any God. the Islamists sated them from the beginning and assaulted the region mercilessly, immediately. So, yeah, you had basically a ract militia kind of pop up to secure the people, and that was a people's protection unit. And when it was clear that they couldn't hold the line because elect support, elect guns, elect ammunition, PKK came in from the mountain. And just like they did with the Yazidis, they secured these people. And yeah, this is where it gets a bit tricky, right?

Right, right. Yeah. There's, I mean, I remember someone explicitly making the comment to me that the YPG was created, more or less because the PKK was on America's FTO, the foreign terrorist organization list. We could work with the YPG. We couldn't work with the PKK. Whether anyone agrees or disagrees with that status on the FTO is debatable, of course. Well, yeah. Go ahead.

Well, it's about Turkey. It's about NATO, right? Turkey is a NATO country. PKK is fighting for Kurdish rights in NATO. They're fighting a fellow NATO ally. So, yeah, they're terrorists. And, yeah, it'd be like labeling in a way, like the Irish dissidents, the entire Irish population is terrorists because they're, you know, during the troubles.

Absolutely. So, well, first off, before we launch into the next thing, I want to give a shout out to the sponsor for the show real quick. Got to what people know out there about the sponsor for this show. Mad Rabbit. Mad Rabbit. So if any of you guys out there have tattoos that you got a long time ago and they're kind of getting older and they're starting to fade,

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Yeah, and not just like, I mean, Jack and I both have tattoos. You guys have probably seen on some of the shows where we get half naked and show them off. But whenever you get a tattoo, like taking care of that tattoo is important. If you don't want it to fade, if you don't want to look like, you know, like Popeye at 80, probably didn't, you know, his task probably didn't look great. And that's because he didn't have Mad Rabbit. If you have tattoos, like, you need something to take care of them, keep that ink sharp to keep the... John, you're going to show us that ink?

I can see. Yep. I could see from here. And like, what did they used to do, right? They used to just cover them up and then you'd rub, like, baby oil or whatever on them, right? I think we're on Alpha, Alpha, Alpha, 4, something like that? I have no, like, back of my day It was like alcohol and baby oil.

It was like, ah, it stings. Oh, wow. Is that a 9-11 tattoo, John? Well, it's a New York tattoo. It's got the skyline. We've got the Staten Island ferry. Yeah. And then, of course, the American flag.

And then on the back here, we've got the Twin Towers. Okay, cool, man. Yeah. So we'll circle back around on this topic with the Syrian Defense Forces, the SDF. John, could you tell us a little bit? about like showing up in the YPG and I'd like to hear a little bit about like the culture of the Tibers or Tabors sorry was correct pronunciation yeah the Tabors the Tabors and like what their composition was like how that kind of

differed from the Marines and what it was like to integrate into one of these units well the Marine Corps the meritocracy was a lot different than the YPG structure the YPG It was a lot about how well you speak or as a foreigner, how well you can learn language and how well you abide by their customs, which consists of no showing of the elbows, essentially respecting the women, not showing too much of your ankles, not showing your elbows, your arms, being very respectful when offered things like such as chai or anything along those lines, being very respectful and learning their culture.

Whereas the Marine Corps, it's all about knowledge. How well you know the knowledge and how well you can PT, that places you on the ladder. So, yeah. What was like the composition? Because like, as opposed to like a marine platoon, a Tabor breaks down in, like, how do they break down into different teams and they each have like, what, three Hyluxes? Like a Tabor is like very, very roughly equivalent to a platoon, like a platoon strength element. So the Tabor's, the Hyluxes, it was based off of a belt.

ability. If you were lucky, you would get once, essentially one squad per Highlux, uh, which would, I'd say would be anywhere from seven to 12 persons. Um, so you would have your tabore and then you have your tac homes, which are essentially your squads. So you'd have about three to four, uh, tack homes per Tobor. And, uh, those were the individuals you would trade, uh, train with, um, when you were lucky enough to get training. And they were the ones you would, develop camaraderie with and then of course a little bit south of the tack-hall you'd get your fire team and which is you'd have your you'd have your bixie gunner which is the machine gunner they'd have the PKM BKM and then you'd have

your RPG gunner which is the Bisving gunner and then of course your team leader and then everybody else so it was very similar to the Marine Corps, but also very different at the same time. Is being that they, the importance was on your respect and your knowledge of the culture and things like that. Did, were there Westerners like involved like higher up who had no tactical ability whatsoever, but because they were culturally savvy, were put in positions that they potentially, maybe they shouldn't have been in? I would say so.

the curves were very big on respect and how well you got to know their culture. The better you got to know their culture and the quicker you got to know their culture, the better off you were. So they were certainly few individuals that were looked highly upon and received positions that maybe they didn't necessarily learn through their combat experiences or contributions. to the YPG. And it also became like overall an issue with inexperienced people coming to the forefront. I think one of you had that experience where the platoon leader, not his fault, but I think you wrote in the book, the prerequisite to become a platoon leader was being 23 years old and still alive just because so many, I mean, people don't really understand like this was a terrible conflict and a lot of Kurds died and a lot of allies, Arab allies died fighting in Syria, you know,

fighting for us essentially for this the syrian defense force alliance yes uh that certainly was uh it was very obvious during the battle for mannbej my platoon commander uh personally uh he was not at the front line it was uh us it was i guess the rest of the tabor um he was back uh behind uh friendly lines and um he was not observing what we were observing so he was giving orders that maybe didn't correlate with what exactly we were seeing on the front lines as his debor. And so it was, yeah, that certainly became a problem at some point. I'd like to hear about.

Sorry, I got very close to punching that commander. Sorry, yeah. I got very close to punching John's commander. He was my commander first and a unit. And I knew, I knew his best. bad news. Like I found a little falcon, bass, my, my, my fighting name means falcon. I found a little falcon and that asshole stole the falcon from me prior to the man be job. Like a little falcon? A real falcon, a little falcon fell out of his nest. No mama. He

looked for someone. I found him. The asshole stole him. So I knew his bad news. And then later, like half of his unit came through a ambulance. Like I was furious about that guy. I was like, how dare you? Like, yeah, I was, I got very, I, I, I parked. I, I, I, I, I, I, launched another commander, but not this one, but I got very close. So which of you were actually like in in it first? John. John. And how did you guys meet?

We met the first time we met in this horrible place called the Academy. It's kind of this hub for all westerners going in and out the conflict. If they're changing units, they kind of hang out there. And it's like, it's like hell. It's the worst, most depressing place. Is that the place where their railroad tracks are? I think so, yeah. No, no, no, that's a slightly different place.

Okay. The academy, it kept changing place. It kept changing place. And it was like they tried to keep it a secret. But yeah, it was just the most miserable place and the most frustrating place. Because like, this is also where all the, you know, Yeppigay didn't vet. Any idiot could show up in the country. And then they realized in Syria.

oh hang out i'm i'm not cut out for this i want to go home right and then yeah they all they all were stranded there and it was a nightmare uh but this is where we met and like with time you had the guys that already fought and just you know just were there for r and i something to catch a breather and then they had the newbies that still had to prove themselves and were you run womb were you yeah we and john went yeah me and john went the room with the vets so we started talking okay um and shooting the shit. But, and then we met on and off behind the front line. But really, like, our bonding moment was during Manbush when, like, I was, I was on this

bono. That's just a scene where we start the book with, where I'm, like, on this bongo van, a civilian driver, like 10, 10 civilians fucked up by mines. They escaped the besieged city through a ring of landmines and IEDs. So I hijacked as the civilian van, put all the, the all the civis on the back and try to get out. And I was like, fuck, I can't do this alone. Like, I'm driving around the part of the front line, you know, with an Arab driver who doesn't understand me. Like, it was a complete shit show. So I remembered this, this Marine being like with

his unit nearby. So I told the driver, like, pull up there. And there was John. I was like, dude, I need your help. He grabbed his rig, hopped on the back, stabilized some of the casualties. and then the driver fucked off to the next hospital. And like the two of us basically hanging on the side of this bongo van, trying to get everyone out alive. And like, yeah, this was, this is a, like I say it in the book, it's a moment maybe, you know, only some maybe other combat veterans can relate to because like a moment like this, it's a bonding.

Like it's a very deep bond, right? It was a worst moment in my entire life. Right. easily it was a horrible day it was like 40 civilians and like three medics how how long had you been serving with the ypg at this point in time about half a year so i was there for about half a year and then went back to germany did a three year three week medic course and went back as combat medic and then what about you john how long had you been serving in the ypg at at this point in time at this point I'd say, let me see

It was about roughly two months the first time And then May June The second time was about five, six months So I'd say about At most eight months total Okay

About seven, eight months So this was I remember as you describe it till I remember in the book It's just like paragraph After paragraph Of injured and dead civilians And just terrible,

terrible shit. But this was the big Bambige river crossing operation? Yeah, that was just after the river crossing. Let's get into that a little bit because that was a huge operation, obviously for SDF, but also for the Americans. I mean, there was seals, Marsox, Special Forces, Delta.

I mean, all of our guys had some little advisory role, whether it didn't really make the papers at the time, but it was... Oh, yeah, it was more than just a... advising. Yeah. Well, you guys want to pick it up and tell us about that river crossing and then the subsequent battle. Well, let the Marines start with the amphibious landing. All right, go for it, John. So we were building up for the Mambesh operation for a few days. I think the first day, we, it kind of came out of nowhere. We packed up from our noctas or our bases out in Tel Tammar,

and we were told, all right, we're moving on to the next operation. We weren't told exactly what was going on. We might have been going to Manbej, we might have been going to Raqa. We weren't told. So we went to a staging point that was west of Saracani, I'd say closer to Kobani. And we were at these silos, and everyone convened at these silos. and then we were told there's going to be a boat operation. And again, we have no idea, or at least on the Tabor level,

and on the individual level, we have no idea where we are, where we're going. We're just told there's a boat operation coming up. And I told my Tabor leader, okay, I'd like to be on the first boat. I want to be on the first boat. Let's go. And then I was informed on exactly what's going on. on the teams, my team was, in fact, the first boat, and there would be a follow-up boats. And we were allegedly supposed to go at one night, and it was canceled due to the moon cover.

I believe it wasn't. Too much illumination. Yeah, I believe it's too much or something like that to where we were delayed. And then the second night, we were good to go. We got the green light. So we loaded up in our Hyluxes and then we rolled out to a staging point. And then from there, myself and my battle buddy, we kind of hung around for a little bit. We were waiting.

Nothing really was going on. And then we posted it up for a minute. We had a seat. I think I racked out for a little bit just to get some rest. And then when I woke up, I woke up to the sound of English being spoken. And I was like, okay, those aren't voices that I recognize what's going on. And then I started looking around and it looked like I saw the green lights on the eyes. So I saw night vision goggles.

Did you guys have night vision? We did. No. Me personally, no. No. The Tabor's, if you did, if you were lucky, you would have one, one thermal optic for the Tabor. and that would be rotated according to who was on watch. Right, right.

So where I was at that point, I woke up, I heard English, and I said, okay, something's going on. And then to me, it looked like, according to the Camys, you know, it didn't look like Mar-Pat, so I assumed they were Army. And then they were having some difficulty organizing the Kurds, trying to explain to them what they needed, because I, And from what I understand from the situation was that their interpreter, he spoke Arabic. He didn't speak Kermaghi too well. So I heard this one individual. He was getting frustrated and I said, what do you need? And then he explained to me.

He's like, I need four columns. And then I translated that in Kurdish. I explained to them four columns. And then they racked up. And then we moved out. So we started moving one column at a time. and then we came up and then I could hear water as we're moving down

this little path. I couldn't see very much but I did hear the water and then we came up on a house and there were Zodiacs stage at this house and then I hearing a few other of them talk apparently this house they've been posted

there for a few days they've been watching the opposite bank and they said they haven't seen any movement for days So all the Kurds, we all loaded up into these zodiacs, and then we made our way across the Euphrates River. And then one by one, the boats started making landing. And I could hear the C-130 above. It sounded like they might have been hammering targets or marking targets.

I could certainly see what would look like flare grenades being fired and landing on the opposite bank, because it certainly lit up the bank for the boats. So to me, it looked like they were marking the LZ. So we started making our way across the river one by one. And then my boat, we pulled up on the opposite bank. We disembarked. And then our boat pilot, I helped him get back out. I had to kick him back out into the Euphrates.

And then... The boat pilot was like a Morsak guy, right? That's what he said. When I was on the boat, I had a pretty big backpack on my back. And he said to me, he said, I believe he said, are you the medic? And I said, no. And I thought he was, he understood the dynamics of being a foreigner with the Kurds. And he was asking if I was a corpsman or something.

And I said, no, but I was a Marine. And then there was a couple seconds of silence. And then he said, I am a Marine. And I looked at him. And he was, he had no weapon. He had no cameys. He was, I think he might have had 5-11s on and some shirt. And I thought, okay, this is what we're doing these days.

okay and then we get to the opposite bank and he's going go go go and then I hopped off the side of the boat and then he he started screaming hey kick me back kick me back and nobody was responding

and I saw him so I so I kicked him back out into the Euphrates ate shit after that Was this the first time that you had encountered U.S. forces that were like U.S. forces?

Certainly that we worked face to face with, yes. We had, they allegedly were, well, yeah, obviously U.S. forces in the battle for Alshadadi, which was a couple of months prior, but I never worked face to face with that. You guys also, I mean, they were there quite a bit ways before us. The French special ops guys were in country. Very much so, yes. Well, the French, I think I saw first. They were there since 2015 in the summer.

We saw them first. That sounds about right. Yep. So the French were there quite early because the French have a different connection to Syria. It used to be French mandate, right? So it's kind of their geopolitical history. Right. It's their real health.

Yeah. Yep. And then the French also, they didn't want to wait for the US. They had their own attacks in France on French soil. And they were like, fuck it, we're going in. The French also, the French state has a more of a positive filial. They have more positive dealings with PKK. There's a lot of PKK in France, not persecuted.

So there's a bit of a history there. This is why there was this connection. But I'd say the first Western Special Forces and, you know, all the Westerners, their talk, the Kurds talk. The first guys, we kind of saw, everyone saw. was like during the first offensives against the Calvert and like May, June 2015, that fighting season. The French were there. They had this little internet van where they coordinated airstrikes with, but there were very much in the back.

And then the next time it was like 2015 fighting season, we would push first ISIS deep into the desert past the Abdel Aziz Mountain. Then we move towards the Belik River, connect the Kobani and the Jazeera Kurdish areas into one connected Kurdish area, pushed ISIS out of there. So the French were around. And then obviously the end of fighting season comes November, the rain comes, mud comes. And in 2016, fighting season kicked off early in like end of February. We went to take Al-Shaddi. and the French were there. At that point, I was one of the few combat medics and inverted commas, really.

I had a three-week civilian training with a German Red Cross, but still was a highest-qualified medic at the front line. I was the only one who had a backpack full with tourniquets, chest seals. So I was King Dingling on the battlefield when it comes to injuries. And I was the only one who realized that you need designated vehicles to get injured out. It's time, time, time. But that's, yeah. So we were, we were like, I was in the, because I was a medic,

I was in the first unit going into, like, enemies' wasteland from Abdulazis mountains. We would, we would infiltrate. We would be like, I was in the first high luck. And the head of us would be sabotage. Our EOD guys looking for mines and shit. Yeah. So we would get in and immediately we get hit by VBIT. So, and after the V-Bid hit us, as soon as we got, got to the southern slopes of the mountain, we were attacked.

And then French fusilias came up with javelins, I believe. And at the time, I was with a German, Shahid Rustin, who later died in that battle. And he was former French Foreign Legion. So he talked to them, and they were like, cool with him. I mean, they were a chatting way. Yeah. And these were some of the first Western soldiers on the ground at the front line, armed ready to blow shit up.

So, so for those of you might not know, V-BID is a vehicle-borne IED, which is a bomb in a car that's generally either parked on the side of the road or driven into, you know, into a convoy if they can find a motivated individual. So did that hit your vehicle or?

No, it was like, You usually, like, you know, there's an idea around because, like, warning shots go, like, morph into the da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Every rifle in the vicinity opens up. So you could usually hear them in, but in this case, like, I got hit or we got hit by Vibits a few times. Sometimes they come as civilian cars, pretending they ask, you know, what's the next, what's the best way to go by and he boom? This one was an armored one, so they had steel plates. Oh, wow. Da-da-da-da-da-da.

Everything plings off. the Duska truck like what is it 12.5 millimeter mounted on a mounted on a truck he couldn't move he missed it RPG he missed it so it drove right into

and then the gunner the the Vib not the gunner the Vibit guy he had this little mat the slit and the metal plating he saw our Jeperje element moved behind the building drove into the building detonated turns out

a family saw shelter in the building the whole thing collapsed on the family humongous shit show. Like, yeah. And then the French came out after that. Yeah. Because it was like, it was just flat desert. And we had nothing against V-Bits. Right.

If an armored one would come, you run. We don't have anything, like you could, you know, you shoot your AK against the steel. That's when you need a tow gunner. This is when you need a toe gunner. With a toe. With a toe, I did. Yeah. So this is when the French came in handy.

And it was a huge moral boost to see French special forces with their equipment right at the front lines. So this was big. And then later advancing on the city, you would see the first Americans kind of being more an advisory role. You know, you would see sometimes with Kurdish command and control element, he would see like Westerners up on the roof with his humongous pineos. And again, at the beginning, the French. French were more present. And then later, like,

Chadat, so early 2016, February, March, the first Americans came out. But for political reasons, the Americans and the Brits were very careful because it was Yepege, right? There was a Red Star. It was a PKK affiliation. And the White House and State Department

until that point, like, wiggled around saying things like, oh, yeah, pegs and PKK, you know, blah, blah, which is nonsense. And everyone would do that. But at that point, we had SDF, Syrian Democratic forces. It wasn't those guys, Yepege anymore. It was Syrian Democratic forces.

Part of Syrian democratic forces were Yepege and Yepege, the all-women humans. But it was also Arab units, Christian units, yada, yada, yada. So for the first time, the U.S. administration could say, we're not fighting with PKK. We're not fighting with Yepeg. We're fighting with SDF. Right. It's tons of Arabs. It's tons of these moderate Islam.

in there, it's Christians. These are the good guys. So politically, America could side. Obviously, America was bombing the shit out of ISIS before that, but on the ground, fighting them, it needed SDF. And by the way, SDF

wasn't, isn't an American invention. It is part of Kurdish political theory. And America just piggybacked on the Syrian democratic forces. Sorry, yeah, Syria democratic forces part of Kurdish political theory. So the Kurdish democratic forces were in a brain. Forces weren't a brainchild.

Or Syrian Democratic forces weren't a brainchild by the U.S. There were legit regional militia. The U.S. could use as a proxy force. And the problem with the YPG in terms of the American, you know, the American vision was that it's, isn't it like a, is it like a communist or Marxist aligned or at least idealized? It used to be. Okay.

It used to be. It used. So if you open Wikipedia, it still says the thing about Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, blah, blah, blah. They change. They change their entire political theory. And we're trying to explain that a bit in the book by 180 degrees. So, yeah, they used to be Marxist Leninist fighting for a communist state. Right.

These days, the Yepegé and the Syrian Democratic forces you meet in Syria right now, fighting for a federal system that resembles the founding fathers, the American founding fathers' ideas of freedom. Right. So there's nothing Marxist, Leninist, blah, blah, blah, about them. The symbology is still there. Right. But, you know, I always say, like, when I would explain Yeppige and the Kurds to American volunteers,

they were all like, yeah, we hear even though they're communists. And I was like, hang on. they actually like strip all the the flags and the symbology of, you know, the red stars and the leftist vocabulary. It's very much a American style democracy, at least what it used to be. When did that change happen? And when Echelan was taken prisoner by the Turkish government. It was in the 1990s. It was in the 1990s in the late 1990s.

And it's very, I mean, I'm going into at the risk of going into full lecturer mode, but it was very because Echelan was not, like Echelan was a movement's weak spot, right? His arrest was always a threat over the entire Kurdish movement. Once he was arrested, well, his arrest wasn't a threat anymore. They could actually intellectually advance the theory and they did. Echelan did it from the prison cell. And what he came up with is about, it's about federalism, essentially, active participation in politics. I'd really encourage people, like this could be like a whole episode in and of itself about democratic confederalism.

And I'd really encourage people to go out there and read a little bit, read up on their own about how it borrows these ideas from Murray Bookchin, who his daughter still lives here in New York City. She's really cool. And ideas from Swiss federalism, these ideas of cantons. But then there's all these very avant-garde ideas in there about like social ecology and all these interesting things that are sort of thrown in there. And as you said earlier, it really is a, it's an experiment. It's like the Kurds in this group of Kurds particularly are really the one political entity that we're really trying from my point of view at least. trying to do something new, that they had this like imagination or creativity to, it really is an experiment. It is an experiment and it's, it's an experiment. And this is what many people like,

you know, you turn on the news these days and look Iran and everyone is chanting Jin, Gianna Zadhi, this is a Kurdish slogan. This is a base. What the women in Iran right now are shouting at the molars that suppress them is a Kurdish slogan. It is about the Kurdish revolution. And it basically assumes that you can only achieve a free society when the women are free. When the women are not oppressed any longer, we have freedom. As long as, as long as, you know, and the Kurds in Syria, they take it to this very extreme level. You know, the women there say, we don't need men. We don't want men for our physical safety anymore.

It didn't work out so far. And it's not going to work out in the future. have our own militia. If someone rapes us, we come after them. We have our own police force, for women, by women. It's a very radical idea thrown into the Middle East, especially if you put that in contrast to Daesh, to ISIS, ISIL, whatever you want to call them. And you see how this idea resonates in the region now. It resonates with the women in Iran. And it comes from the the Kurdish mountain. It comes from a Turkish prison cell where Aitjalan is basically being held. And it spreads all over the region. And like if you want to theorize it a bit further,

America's mistake in the war and terror was enforcing a political idea that was alien to the region. In Rojava, America supported a regional idea or an organic idea of democracy. And that worked. This is why the, yeah. I just want to throw it over it, John, for a second, as a, as a Marine Corps veteran arriving in Rajavah, not a whole lot of probably local knowledge, but from you, you said you learned the language pretty well. What was it like ideologically for you going from U.S. Marine to YPG volunteer? What was that ideological component like for you to assimilate into it? In the beginning, it was a polar opposites meeting. But over time, I got to understand where they were coming from, and I got to really sympathize where they were coming from.

Coming from the Marine Corps, where if you just hammer a nail harder and harder and eventually gets to where you need it to go. And then understanding the yep again, yep, jaire to where that doesn't really work. Different nails require different amounts of strength and all of that. Um, so understanding where they were coming from, uh, it was, um, an enlightening experience. Um, uh, yeah, certainly to say the least, uh, for, especially for how they, uh, objectively see the world compared to how, uh, myself, just, uh, your marine grunt, just hammering nails. Can you explain that at all? Okay, is I know that that's probably a huge, like a very abstract concept, but can you explain sort of how they see the world versus how like an American soldier or Marine might see the world? Mm-hmm.

I'd say as a Marine where hyper-realism, you know, that's kind of, or I would assume any American veteran is hyper-realistic when it comes to anything, policies, procedures. and the Kurds, they were, they were pretty loose and much more, extremely more sympathetic when it came to certain things. Like decisions are arrived by conversation and, like, talking, right? I'd say so. But for example, as an example, specifically in, like, the Battle of Alshaddi, where we had a couple of teen boys. ride towards our lines on a motorbike. And motorbikes had been blowing up our lines left and right.

And where I had my Kalashnikov off safe, ready to rock and roll, the Yepes-Yea kind of took the lead on that, on situations like that. It wouldn't be like, hold on, let's see what's going on. And they dealt with the individuals. and then you had guys like myself ready, expecting this is where we're going to get hit because this is our vulnerability, kids and women. And then, and then gratefully, nothing came out of that situation. And then I remember clicking my Kalashnikov off safe, and then everyone heard the sound of that and the yep, is yeah, everyone looked at me, like, okay. And then it was, it was kind of refreshing in a sense.

I felt like they looked at me like, what are you doing? And I felt like I looked back at them like, I'm watching your backs. That's what I'm doing. Yeah, it kind of, I mean, to me, it sounds like it puts you in a tough situation. Because as you say, if motorbikes are their weakness and they're getting hit, then maybe that conversational attitude is why they keep on getting hit by motorbikes. And just because in this one instance, it doesn't happen. You know what I mean?

It like reinforces this idea. See we can, you know what I mean? But by the same token, this time it didn't happen. So not that you look like the asshole, but you're like, oh, what, you know, look at this hyper aggressive dude. It's like, yeah, but we keep on getting hit by motorbikes. Yeah. So that was, I'd say. a conflict we had in cultures.

Yeah. For me, being a former Marine and having learned from the Marines before me, it's, every, you give slack to someone, and that's where the mistakes happen. Right. So, but the Yepesia were more nurturing and less aggressive. And so there was a balance. And I felt like we kind of respected each other. Right.

And it worked out for the most part. And just for people who are unfamiliar, because I don't know if we brought it up before, the YPage is the female equivalent of the YPG. Yes. The woman's militia, as Baz was pointing out, they're separate. Yes. Completely. Yep. Sorry.

Yeah, they're completely separate. They have their own command structure, on training facilities, on vehicles, on weapon cashies. One of you wrote about an experience in the book where when the YPG came in in liberated areas, they would get a more hostile response. But when the YPJ came in in liberated areas, like people saw what Baz was talking about that like if the women are this free, then you're not coming here to like oppress us. No, that's a difference between like it's the Middle East. You know, you have like, there's wars constantly and there's guys telling local population,

or we are the good guys, you're free now. And obviously they're not. And then you have like a truck. Like it's, you have a truck coming to a village that was until, you know, 30 minutes ago on the ISS rule for the last three years. And the truck is packed with 12 women, driving their own car with Kalashnikovs, with AKs, with PKMs, with RPGs, just secure at the village going, all right, women, you're safe now. Yeah. And these, these local women are just. got liberated.

Right. They understood this political theory in an instant. Right. And frankly, it's quite funny when you saw like, you know, we talked about the river crossing. And like when John went over there with the zodiacs, I would go later. I would be my ambulance and my team would be brought over by a seal team on this little pontoon. But I would just shoot the shit until it was our turn with Samaso guys waiting there.

And I would talk about the yeah pege. And I was like, oh, yeah, she, you know, referring to one of the commanders, she has like tons of confirmed kills with a, with a druganov three times, with a standard three times scope. She was a sniper and they're like, holy cow. Like, and later all the special forces guys like actually force multiplying with the Kurdish forces during the battle, they love the epige for what they were. Yeah.

Because because of what they contributed to the conflict and how they changed the conflict. Let me give you one other example. It's a conflict where sexual violence, especially against women, but also men was part of the conflict. Right. Dash would have like rape houses. Right. Like all of these things. And then you have the yet pagee on the other side.

It's like, holy cow. Like if there was ever good versus evil, that obvious it's right here. Yeah. Like the locals knew immediately that they are safe. And like not a single international volunteer I know has come across any sexual abuse by anyone, because there's armed women. A third of the fighting force is armed women. Right. And you don't want to mess with them.

Right. Like there is this one instant where me and Sean stand in the middle of a, in the middle of a desert during in 2015 during one of the operations. And now and like three trucks of our Arab allies come in. And they were like four miles and those rag guys. They had like, they had like African dudes with this massive like swords on their backs and big beards. And they see two Westerners standing there alone without a vehicle in this little village. And it was like, holy fuck, what's going to happen now? Like Sean and I were like slowly taking the safety off the AK.

And it was like, fuck, this is this is not. And then the Yeppese woman, a commander walks out of a hut like eating, drinking a chai or something and just telling the, the Al-Nusra guys to fuck off, and they did. Because the Jepajee had a reputation in that war, and the Islamists didn't want to mess with them. I remember some of the American special forces guys telling me about Rajda and like how much respect Rajah Fulat had on the battlefield, and that there were like entire Arab battalions that she was commanding, which is, it's surreal. It's completely surreal, especially in that part of the world.

But it's a Middle East, right? you get you need to bleed and have casualties in order to be taken serious right like westerners made it into the fight once we had enough casualties it's a brutal logic but that's how it works like once we had once we had enough casualties in shahids k ias we were taking serious as a as a as a part of this of the alliance and it was the same with the yet he didger yeah like these islamas probably fought the yeah before um before they switched side and defected essentially, and they know what they're like. And it's like most of the international volunteers who'll talk to love the

Yeppeje for being vigilant, more vigilant than the Yepeje, more disciplined than the Yepege, because the women had more to lose and more than the gain. For the men, it was just yet another war and an endless series of battles. For the Yepeje, it was about freedom. Right. Yeah, I mean, the amount of like human trafficking and everything going on from ISIS from Dish was it was unworldly, right? And it spread like, look, it spread like, let's not make a secret out of it. All this human trafficking, all this abuse, it spread from ISIS into the UN camps.

Like, you know, in the UN run refugee camps, you would have rich Arabs from Lebanon fly in and buy children and shit. Right. Like it was dark. And then there's a yeah, pejor. you know, if there's any abuse, well, they take you behind the building and put that into you in the back of your head. And when I say human trafficking, like I don't mean to minimize it because it really is women and child trafficking.

You know, it's like we say human trafficking, but we're really focusing on the women and children that are being trafficked and under, you know, Desh and, you know, other forms of that. What's, uh, yes. Well, I'd like to complete the Nambi's story. after you got to the other side of the river to circle back around on that and the subsequent battle that you guys

bought in. So what happened on the other side of the Euphrates? So once we crossed and all the boats left and gratefully we hadn't taken contact. It was very confusing in the beginning.

Even the Marsak guys. They, when we were leading up to the river crossing, when we were floating out in the Euphrates, I had asked him, are they taking contact? And they said, we don't know. And I, but I could hear their radios. They, it was going wild.

But he said, we don't know. So I thought, okay, this is going to be crazy. But once we crossed, we, and then they, they took off. It was fairly safe. We hadn't taken contact. but our our or the YPG EOD guys, aka sabotage came in, and then they had to clear an entire strip

so we can start moving forward. Right. So that's what they did. I remember we had taken cover. We were looking up at these mountains and I was on the, I suppose, the opposite side of what appeared to be a concrete bridge.

And I had my back against it. And then the sabotage guys had gone up, left and right to clear, or to check for and clear any mines. And then maybe an hour or two later, we were given the green light to continue up our path, which ended up being, I suppose, up the side of a mountain. that I would assume you wouldn't expect minds to be planted in. So we spent from that moment, we spent about 24 hours, just going, clearing that one mountain pass, and then going from mountain to mountain, clearing, pretty much doing everything a Marine hopes to do.

You do an amphibious landing, and then you clear this mountain top, this hilltop. Then you assault that one, and then you go to the next, and you go to the next, and you just go from mountain to mountain. And that's what we did for essentially the first 48 hours. And was there, were these areas, were they strongholds? Is that why you're going through them? Was there fierce resistance throughout those mountains? There was not fierce resistance. I'm not, I, I'm under the impression we chose that pass or that pass,

because it was the narrowest to cross the Euphrates. And as the Morsak guys had told me before we crossed, they said, hey, we haven't seen any moving on the other side in weeks. So I assume, you know, the SOCOM guys, they looked and said, hey, this is probably the safest path to take, and we're going to take it. And then we hopped when we were doing mountain to mountain, And we did come across certain bunkers, bunkers, where ISIS had clearly dug in prior to us getting in there.

And then, but we had thrown frags. We had, we did what we have to do to clear those bunkers before we move forward. Right. And surprise, to my surprise, we hadn't come across any ISIS guys. Did you, could you still hear AC130 flying overhead? constantly yeah yeah i'd say so i feel like 18130 once somebody knows what that sounds like it's a huge motivation to get out of the area yes it's a most wonderful sound to me until today it really is yeah in the early days of the conflict we would like we would hold the extended

overstretched line six guys one village and when the 813 1 30 suddenly shows up yeah we were like Fuck. And they were just pounding the enemy and it was just wonderful. Yeah. The whole Kurdish cons, the whole Kurdish front line was like, whoof, being relieved at moment, at least when it's dark. And the enemy had the momentum until then, right? Yeah. And the, but once the, once the Kurds and the Americans started their close alliance,

ISIS withdrew to the cities. They gave up the countryside because they can't hold it. There's no place to hide from, from AC. Yeah. No, we would like, yeah, the very first operation, like into the Caliphate, pushing the bastards back. I would remember we would just drive through the desert, like, and we would see this half-duck bunkers with charcoal bodies in them.

Like they weren't ready for U.S. airstrikes. And then that was 2015. So I'd say in March 2000, 2015, America just bombed ISIS suddenly in Syria. And then in summer 2016, the Kurds had the airstrike app on a tablet. They just made peep and a bomb dropped. Like ISIS gave up, ISIS gave up the countryside. They had the usual village idiots there to hold the line and slow things down, mess things up. They had mines, IDs, all of that.

But the fight was the cities. It's funny because, and we've had, you know, we've had people from the AC community on here before and we've talked about it. And for those of you who don't know, like, you know, you have jets come in and you're like, you know, you hear it and drop to stuff. But with an AC, it's like, it's like a muffled lawnmower that you hear constantly because it's a rotor room is flying low out and you can hear it. And it's sort of like when the bad guys hear the AC just overhead, it's like when you're trying to break in somebody's house and you hear a shotgun racking. It's like, okay, I'll pick someplace else, right? Them and the, the eight tens were doing God's work over there. Yeah, the eight tens.

fam. I love the I love the brs sound. I have the good recording of one. Yeah. It's yeah, I like without the A10s and the AC130s, I wouldn't be sitting here. I can tell you that. Yeah. Like it was without US

airst strikes, I wouldn't be alive. Yeah. What happened with the the Manbej battle from your perspective, Bill? Well, I was like, at that point, I was just made the commander of the Yeppegas or SDS. first combat medic unit, right?

We had this, I found me and a buddy found this shot up ambulance on a scrapyard and fixed it up. And we had a, I think, a Nissan minivan or something. We would run like this combat medic team with a bunch of American guys. And anyways, like the guy selected me for their leader as you do in the militia. Funnily love the geography teacher. There were a few American veterans, but whatever. So, yeah, I was just.

just chilling, waiting to cross the bridge to Manbech. So ISIS had blown up the last third, the last third of the bridge. So two thirds on our sides were still good. So I would just bring my ambulance on there. My guys are just drinking like the three and one Syrian coffees, chatting with the masks of guys. And then eventually we would be called. And then there was like mine injuries, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You know, contact. So they wanted the medics over. So we would drive on the pont. element segment and then it was like a seal team who had like zodiacs on both sides and was just shuddling it back and forth. It would be like about six hyluxes or two tanks on this on this float that would bring us over and then we would go towards the battle and then it was like yeah I said like the ISIS gave up the countryside so it was like fairly easy getting you know advancing advancing advancing, not much happening. And then the closer we got to the city, more Americans came out,

more French special forces came out. The Brits came out, although they kept saying they were Americans. Well, until we would hang out with them. And I'm like, oh, come on, man, I studied in the UK. I know where you're from. And then they dropped the act. And the Americans were saying they were Brits or whatever. Yeah, everybody, every kind of high their involvement. Yeah, something like that. Exactly. And but yeah, we would like, the closer we'd get to the city, the tens of it would get, tension would build up. And yeah, it was like clear to everyone that this is going to be, this is going to get very dark very soon. And it did.

As soon as reached Manbech, the outskirts, it was like a fairly large city for the for the region. And ISIS had spent years fortifying it, like later. of sabotage would find like in the perimeter houses around the city they would find like 23 25 IDs in one building everywhere everywhere under the buildings under the dormits under the carpets yeah the curtains everywhere there were mines everywhere and we couldn't get into the city like we would try to get into the city and the bastards would push us out and we would take casualties like world war one style um so very soon like we were overwhelmed Like my medic team was completely and utterly overwhelmed.

And very soon the Americans that were based with Kurdish command and control, which was just behind the fighting. So you had like these central hubs just behind the fighting, where troops would rotate in and out of the fighting. The fuel truck would get there. Logistics would get there with food. So it was kind of these central hubs. You would, around the city of Manbiz,

you had like five to six of these hubs behind. the fighting and this is where Western special forces would deploy with Kurdish command and could or SDF command and control to force multiply, meaning calling in air strikes, mortaring. And then pretty quickly also helping with the casualties of war they got out. And so as soon as we hit the city and as soon as the first units tried to breach, it was a nightmare. Like these units would get like casualty rates of 50, 60, 70 percent. send. So many of these units would be like 16 year old kids of both sexes being sent into this meat grinder into these minefields with no training, not enough ammo, no medical supplies. Like the only medical supplies they had were like tourniquets. My team produced on the bazaar was like locally, like we manufactured them locally. Basically reverse engineered the cat turnicates. We would hand out like these stiff plastic thingy. and duct tape to improvise chest seals and shit.

There was nothing. And it was just devastating. And then as soon as the special forces guys realized the scale of things like their medics would rotate in, work with us. And then at times the whole special forces team would help out when we had mass casualty events, especially with civilians, right? Because ISIS had, in Bend Beach, had about 50,000 human hostages, civilians. civilians in the city and they wouldn't let them out.

So any civilian that would try to flee the caliphate the city would be seen as a traitor and be punished. So in their desperation, these people didn't have any food. They didn't have water because Daesh confiscated it all. So they were desperate. They were starving. The children were starving. And once in a while you had a group so desperate that they would try to run

through the minefields and the ring of snipers. ISIS had set up. And you had events with like 40 injured civilians, children, women mainly. And it's like these special forces medics were like, what the fuck is going on here? How did you guys extract them from that hostile fire zone? If they got wounded in the minefield and in, you know, from snipers. Yeah. Well, sometimes they crawled out. Sometimes other forces got them out, sometimes redact them out, and you, well, yeah, you run in, grab them and fuck off as possible. And you get them out. And you try to get them to the next facility where they can be stabilized, which was two hour, three hours away. And that was Kobani Hospital. Again,

on the sanctions, the dogs did the best they can. But yeah. So like really early, after the day, we reached the city, we had like an American with around through the neck coming out of the mouth. we had like it was a it was dark and like after a week these special forces medics like came to us I was like holy fuck guys like we packed on based on our experience we backed be packed supplies for a month yeah we ran out we are we are here since a week and we ran out yeah like I remember one of the special forces medics always going like fuck fuck fuck I should have brought my GoPro this is like we in this one week I've seen everything from our training manuals Yeah.

You know, just for training purposes, we should have just recorded that it was, yeah, it was just a medieval warfare with snipers and like a besieged city with mines and snipers. And it's Jerry, very brilliant. I talked to one American volunteer over there at YPG volunteer, and he said a Navy SEAL medic sewed his penis back together on the Man Beach battle. You know who I'm talking about? Cato. Yeah.

I got him out. We got him out. Yep. We never talked about it publicly, but since you bring it up. Well, that's a party trick, right? I heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy. Yeah. Sure.

Yeah. John, during this, like, what was your experience? Because you guys had hit these mountains and then you were approaching the city, right? So what, what did you guys experience from the combative side? So with my Tabor, my Tabor, aka a platoon, slowly but surely we were being hacked away. Every night or day operation, slowly but surely we had about a squad worth of people being hacked away.

I was lucky. I had the night shift. We had survived. We got through the mountains, and then I remember one day in particular, where it was very difficult we had to get from the mountains down into a village to where we eventually would mount up to vehicles and then get to the next village. It was very odd. It was, I suppose, early in the offensive. So there was lots of mortars going on incoming. But we weren't getting hit very much.

We had, we had the Gepijia, they had gotten hit on one of the mountains that they were on. I suppose a dash vehicle had made their infiltrated our lines and had opened up with the Dyska, which is basically the Russian 50-Cal. Yes. And then we had taken at least one. casualty from there to where I remember the Yeppe Ge had to put her on a stretcher and then hump her out of there and she survived luckily

but from what I can remember as we made our way through the mountains we made our way into the country or I suppose the outer limits of the Manbej city yeah outer limits of Manbej we had we encountered I suppose

counterintelligence or we had encountered civilians that were sided with dash that were trying to lead us in the wrong direction and that was immediate I remember in particular immediately we had missed our armored vehicle ride our rendezvous out in some fields, so we had to

hump it out to a to a to a highlux that brought us into a compound, and then we made our way into a compound taking fire, hearing vehicles going left, going right,

and then when we were in that compound, I had heard the the Yepagee or Yepige, opening up somewhere, somewhere to my 12 o'clock, where I was off on the left flank,

providing security, didn't have anything coming that way. And it turned out what was going on at the 12 o'clock was there was what would be per take or what would be understood as a village elder approaching our lines, holding a baby. But it turned and he was approached. us waving his hands and the yep again was saying no stop stop and he kept approaching us and then um they had opened fire on this individual and then he had gone down and it turned out the baby he was holding was uh an iED and then he had blown himself up once he had gone down

uh happened quite a lot actually yeah yeah like we were sent my medic team was one sent to this this compound on some civilian families farm outside man beach and like we knew like me and me and my body we sensed immediately something is off with these guys like they're not on our side so we're like yeah yeah sure we go on that building blah blah blah and then we fucked around fucked off the other way around and like five minutes later vib it drove into that particular building the ass all blew itself up in an empty building um but that that happened quite frequently yeah that that locals would try to lure you into a trap and then ISIS would come with a V-bit or something.

Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's tough in those scenarios because like, the idea of the caliphate wasn't, like, there were a lot of people who were in favor of that idea of an Islamic caliphate,

right? That, that ISIS was, and sometimes they were also under duress to do this stuff. Like, it's, it's hard to tell. Like, is their family being held hostage and they're being forced to do this. Like you never know what somebody's motives are and nobody's wearing a uniform. So, you know, who are the good guys, who are the bad guys? Is this person on a cell phone just talking on the cell phone or are they setting off an IAD

underneath your vehicle? Yes. And there was this, there was all these stories about many of the V-bits being actually driven by like some family dad whose family was taking hostage. Right. And there were, these guys wouldn't detonate their V-bit. There were all they were just toll drive there and then some ISIS guy from the distance would remote detonated, right? So once American Special Forces and the Brits started jamming the frequencies, some of these VBVits didn't go off anymore because, yeah, it was just an average show in there pressed into the ranks. John, speaking of being lured into a trap, you want to tell us this story?

One of the scariest stories is when your Tabor got lured into this village and ambushed. Um, sure, yeah. So, once we crossed over into, into, uh, ISIS lines in Mambesh, so we had been, um, leading up to the city up until this point. And, um, from what I understand, ISIS had a perimeter. Like, we're, we're moving into inner city Mambesh, uh, from this point. And that we had a night operation, my favorite, uh, to where we're going to move out from this one nocta, you know, this one point,

and they crossed over the berm that ISIS had built with their own bulldozers. You know, they had dug out the berm, built it up, and we were the first to penetrate it. So we left from this one nocta in the middle of the night, and we had made our way up to the berm. And then I had heard of the C-130s, hammering away targets. And we got the green light across. And so that's what we did. So myself, my battle buddy, Danny, we were the first, I'd say, within the first three people to cross over the berm into Isis Territory.

in Mabesh. It was Danny, myself, and our team leader, which was Yepajé, a Yepijé commander, I guess. So we made our way over the berm, no problem.

Nothing. And then everyone else followed us over, and that we had congregated on the backside of a building. So we crossed over the berm, hopped over the little ditch that had been built as part of the berm and congregated on the backside of the building,

ready to move into inner city Mambit. And we had done that, and we had moved forward, and I remember we hadn't received much, any resistance at this point. We had heard the C-130 overhead hammering targets, but had zero intel. Didn't know if they were hammering

motorbike drivers. Didn't know if they saw anyone on rooftops. Didn't know if they saw anything. But we heard them hammering targets as we were maneuvering. So we maneuvered to this first building and then we continue to a building

that I'll call Nocta Yac. Knocked a Wand, is basically 0.1. We had moved to this one building. It was a compound. It had, uh, it had, um, there were three front doors to this building. Um, uh, two of the front doors were not built into it. So it was like two thirds of this building where they were working on but didn't finish. But a third of the building, um, had been finished. And so we got there and then the one-third of the building that had been finished, I coincidentally had heard a female cough as we were going underneath the window.

I remember hearing it and I was watching it. And I reported it to my squad leader, who is a fresh squad leader because our squad leader before us had been relieved. and I told them, hey, I heard something in this window. And then we cleared those other two doorways. We went into the building. It was basically abandoned, you know, just as most of the buildings in Syria. You know, they had been, people had stopped working on them once the Civil War picked off. So we had cleared two-thirds of the buildings.

We went up, multiple floors, up to the rooftop. up. And our squad leader had called it in as Nocte Yac, you know, point one to the American, which I assume that's going to the Americans. So this is Nocte Yac. This is point one since we made the breach into Dash territory. And then we cleared the building, came downstairs, but they were still the doorway on the far right side. The three doorways, it was the far doorway on the far right side that we hadn't cleared and the door was closed. So I don't know why we didn't clear that doorway.

I pointed out, I said, hey, to my commander, my squad leader, pointed out, hey, that's the doorway. That's most likely where I heard the cough coming from. it was the right side of the house, the witch would have aligned with the window that I had heard the cough come from, but he decided, he said, no problem, we're just going to continue going.

So it felt like a movie moment in a sense where I'm looking at this doorway and I'm like, this is where I heard the cough. We hadn't had any intelligence before then. I said, I know someone's in here. I don't know what that cough was. It could have been best case scenario, a woman just coughing. Worst case scenario, a dash wife saying, hey, we have some people outside.

So it was very, it was one of those situations with the Kurds where you have to say, fuck it. And then you just move on with the next. So it was that situation. So I was just like, oh, okay. All right. You don't care. All right, we're moving forward.

So from there, from Nocte Yack, we move forward, and we move into what I would, what I perceived as a square, a town square type of situation. Like, we had to cross over a broken cinder block wall, and then we walked into an olive grove, which at the end of the olive grove, you had basically a town square. square. You had an intersection, a four-way intersection, and it was filled with buildings that were basically abandoned in their construction all the way around, 360. It was just abandoned buildings, open windows. And that's, we had approached the intersection, and that's where I had heard. Someone above me in a window, I heard the ever-familiar sound of a cinder block

being kicked. You know, like just a basic cinder block being kicked along a concrete floor. I had heard that, and I thought oh, shit. So I brought that to my squad leaders. I said, hey, I heard that. Um,

and then he's, I suppose he was trying to process what what was going on. I said, hey, I heard something up here. But I could only assume due to the previous situation where I said, hey, I heard someone cough and we didn't find anybody,

but also we hadn't got into their section of the house. He didn't take it too seriously. But my battle buddy at the time, Danny, he said, John, did you see that red light? and I said, uh, no. And I thought, uh, fuck. Uh, this is it.

Because the red lens, you know, the red lens moon beam, you know, it's military. It's game on. Right. So he said that and I said, no, I, I hadn't seen it when he was looking and I'm trying to communicate with my squad leaders, uh, what was going on in this window. And he saw that. And I had it. And I said, oh, no, I didn't.

But it's game on. So I had switch arms ready to rock and roll watching this window. And the squad leader decided the squad is going to, we're going to push forward. So I was tail end Charlie in the squad. And the front started moving. And then now I'm looking out in the square watching the windows because I'm like, all right, something's in here. I don't know what it is. it could be a civilian like we had just heard

or it could be a dashed guy waiting to blow my head out. Is your squad leader walking through the square or around the side of the square? Through it with the squad. Hey, diddle diddle straight up the middle? Yep. Yeah, he was a squad leader due like ideological alignment. Yeah, other than like combat experience. So I had heard that.

and then we're moving forward. So now I'm watching forward and also keeping awareness with the guy that I know is right above my head in this window. And as the front steps out, I hear the sound of an AK taking fire. And then in my head, it all happened to slow motion. In my head, I'm like, okay, no one's... no one said anything about our guys being like I can hear that it's going somewhere

no one had told us anything about yepagee or yeppigeg people being in this house it's game on so I was on patrol you know with a glashnik call of the safety

is on the right side yeah so I would when I would go out on patrol I would it would be on kill and then this would be my safety. So I had heard that and it just all clicked. I just opened up on the I looked up, saw a male with his left forearm and is a clashing a call of sticking out of the window of a third floor window shooting at the front of the patrol. So I opened up on him and

I'd say I unloaded about half a magazine before he disappeared. He got a lead salad. I'd like to believe so. He disappeared from the window and that I stopped to take in what's going on. You know, the fog of war kind of settled for a second, and I realized I was by myself. And I, nobody else was shooting back. I was by myself and I knew there was someone

above me at the same time so while I was engaging the person at the third floor I was also watching the window right above my head waiting for someone to pop out looking to pop me and then hopefully I'd pop him

so the smoke, the fog of war cleared and I realized that was by myself and I kind of I ducked back into my right side, which was an alleyway in between this building and the building behind us. And I started yelling for my battle buddy Danny. Danny's watching right now, just so you know. Danny's on, yeah.

All righty. Well, so I called for Danny, nothing the first time. And I was thinking, oh, not good. So I called them again. And I'm watching all of these windows on the side of this. cinder block building and then sure enough I hear Danny

he responds and I say Danny come to me and then it takes him a second I'm watching these windows but it takes him a second I believe he was somewhere on the front porch of this house yeah

and is that when the conversation goes fuck you you come to me like close yeah I mean that's That's how it goes, right? Straight up black hawk down vibes.

And he had it come. And I was like, Daddy, where are you? And then he finally, he pops out of nowhere around the side of the building. And he just hops down. I'm like, come, dude, come on. Like, we got to get out of here. So he comes around and we back our way up from this one building in front of us. We back our way around a building behind us into an olive green.

that was kind of shielding us. So I remember taking and me and talking to Danny and be like, all right, dude. We are fucked. And then we're trying to sort out what's going on, and we realize like, the truth did dust. Whoever had the Biss Ving,

you know, the RPG, left. Whoever had the 240, the PKM, left. And I'm like, all right, we can't move forward, just us to. We should probably, our best bet is probably to move back and try to consolidate our force, you know, try to figure out what's going on and then find our strengths

and then move forward from there. We've got a building, as far as I know, filled with ISIS people, that we barely just survive. And we don't want to move forward and mess around, you know, we don't know what's going on there. And we don't know where our allies, are. We might be doing a disservice by moving forward and aggravating the ISIS individuals in this house. So after a back and forth a little bit, Danny and I agree on we're going to, it was my decision. I said, I believe the best decision to make would be to pull back to knock the yak, where the Americans had the grid. I said, I think if we pull, back there. I think the Americans

naturally would send a drone around and check that grid just to see okay, this is where, this is the last poorness that we know the Kurds cleared. Is it still clear? So I said, I think that's the best way to go back to knock the

yak and hold that down. Also because pulling back further than that would be pulling back prior to the breach. Outside of the village

Yeah. Right. Outside of ISIS lines. Right. And I thought if we do that, we are, everyone who tries to move forward after us is fucked. Right. Because it's going to be daytime.

And they're just going to be, they're dug in. ISIS is dug in. So we can't lose this breach. Right. So I said, let's pull back to Nocteke and hold it down as long as we can and just pray that the Americans can see us and send, tell the Kurds, hey, yeah, they are still at Nocte Yacht send reinforcements.

Yeah. So that was our agreement. And then when we had agreed to do that, I believe our Bissving Gunner, the RPG Gunner, had opened up on the building, in which case a unit behind us called 223, which was made up of mostly Americans, lots of Marines, and French foreign legionnaires. They had

opened up on this building, which I believe marked it for airstrike very soon afterwards. But from there, Danny and I retreated, and our goal was to get back to Nocteke. To hold it down.

And Danny and I had, in the process, getting back to Nocta Yek, we had to cross the olive grove and we got into a farmhouse and while dandy and i were on in that farmhouse trying to figure out where exactly we were compared to nocte yek because we didn't know the coordinates we just knew um visually what it looked like um and we had just passed it recently but you know it was still the middle of the night sure um so we had got into a farmhouse and we were going to try to get onto the roof to try to see

to orient ourselves. And we had heard Kermaghi being spoken outside of the house. And I had told Danny, okay, hey, I hear courage being spoken. I'm going to, you know, I'm

going to, I was on the first floor. Danny was on the second floor. I said, I'm going to try to, I'm going to see what's going on. They're either going to shoot me or they're going to be friendlies and they still might shoot me. Mm-hmm. So. Yeah, no running passwords or anything like that, right?

Absolutely not. It was the, the, the, the, inshallah. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Like when Danny and I had met up, uh, the, the problem issue with going back was I said, they're going to, they're more likely to shoot us. Right. And the dashed guys in front of us, they want to cut our heads off. Right. These guys behind us are just scared. They don't want to get their heads cut off. Yes. Right.

So the, I was more scared about running. backwards than I was about running forward. So when we're in this house, I heard it, and I was like, oh, Jesus, please, please be Yepes-Jet, or Yep,eget. So I opened the window,

it's yep again. It's our Bissfing, gutter, and our squad leader. So I'm like, have all, have all! Bionni, Bioni, which is foreigner, you know, which is what the word that they gave us. So I communicate, I'm like, foreigner, foreigner,

and then they're, and then they see me and they're happy to see me. They come into the compound and we kind of regroups. Now we've got myself, Danny, and then the squad leader with the radio and the bisming gutter. But where's the rest of the squad? They had to run off. They left him. Well, the story is the girl or the epige girl with our PKK. And once, and radio, once we started taking contact, she had dumped her stuff and just took off running in her sandals.

Back, all the way back to the 223 base that I was too afraid to go back to because I thought we'd be shot. So, but, yeah, the story with her, she dumped the machine gun, dumped her radio. So Dash got her radio. And she ran all the way back, across the berm, back to 212. two, two, three lines. So you guys just did a crypto role, right? Then, um, I, I assume. Did, I mean, did they have crypto on the radios?

Were they using that? No. No, nothing. No. They had basically like off the shelf Walmart radio. Right. Right. At least at the beginning, yeah, until America stepped up to support.

I, I have to ask, especially, uh, and I'm curious about the comments that you heard from other people's you, you, you hadn't served. But marine infantry training. Like, I liken it to Ranger training when it comes infantry tactics. Like, the Marine infantry training is no joke. It's very regiment. It's very fast. The squads are different than an infantry squad.

But it's very rock and roll, right? And it's very formalized. Actually, no. Oh, you said absolutely. Okay. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The worst Marine, I'd say, could still lead a squad in combat.

Right. So how was it for you? Because I could see why a lot of Americans, especially like prior service Americans, would want to team up because maybe the tactics weren't always up to snuff in these YPG units you were in. Like, how did you guys manage that? Because you couldn't just take the lead.

You couldn't like follow me. Yeah. How did you, did you just like, was there just, was there fatalism to it like well whatever happens happens in a sense in this part what I was saying earlier about where we had reconnected with my squad leader

with the radio that that was the important part when we had reconnected with him and we all reconvened in this compound I had told him I grabbed him and had told him hey this is in my broken Kurdish You know, I said, you need to call the Hevalz.

And given the coordinates for Nocta Yek. We're going back to Nocta 1, and we're going to hold it down, and you're going to call on reinforcements. Because it was also, I'd say, within 100 meters of the berm. Behind Nocta Yek, there was a building, and then behind Nocta Yek, within 100 meters. It probably was, like, within 50, quite honest. the berm was. And I said, we're going back to Nocte Yacht because that's where I assume the Americans would be looking to see if we still have that one set of coordinates that they gave us. And it's a hard point into the village that everybody else can use. Yes. And I say, we're going back there. We're going to hold that down. And that he was on it. He was on it. He got on the radio and he did everything I told him to do. And then sure, and then we hold it down. And then we're there and I'm looking around and I'm kind of like, did you do what I think you did everything that I thought happened happened and then sure enough after like 40 minutes I started seeing behind me because I could see the root I started seeing heads pop up over the burrub and I was like oh my God thank God we're not about to die here right we've got reinforcements coming right and then and they were being sniped at because the sun had come up right the sun had come up and I'm watching them and I'm thinking and I can hear the sniper shots and I can see them and I'm like, oh my God, this is, this is almost unbelievable.

Did you guys ever get back to Checkpoint 1? We were, yeah, at this point, we were at Checkpoint 1 holding it. Did you clear that room? The room on the right? Wasn't that in the building? Like, wasn't that Checkpoint 1, the room on the right that he didn't clear that you heard the cough from? No, we didn't clear that part of the building. No.

We did not. but where we were the part of the building we were we cleared everything sure so you guys did finally take man bej the war I mean this war ground on

into 2019 and there's this one line in the book that I thought was it says it all and also nothing at the same time right you write eventually somewhere in the desert, the long war against ISIS ended.

What do you guys want to say about the end of the war and how its conclusion? I mean, in some sense, it's still going on, right? But what was the conclusion of your war, John? And then we'll talk to, I know Baz kind of went into Missoul as well. What was the conclusion of the war for you on a personal level? On a personal level, I would say the tactical, conclusion of Raka.

I wasn't there for that, but I know I followed it and I suppose technically it was ended, but

to be honest, I don't think it really was. Yeah, how do you win a war against ideology, right? Or an ideal. Yeah, I would even,

I mean, personally, I would even go a bit further. I'd say the war. war didn't not end there, really, it kind of just set up the next war that's coming. Right. Because ultimately, by cracking down so hard on this, like after 2003 and like Saddam was the Sunni, ISIS were Sunni extremists, like cracking down on Sunni Islam in Iraq and Syria,

weakened the Sunni so much that the Shia, aka Iran, is now taking over. And that's going to be the next one. Israel is not going to tolerate the Shia crescent from growing and growing and growing. And this is like it just signed a book deal for the next book on that, like how that is going to lead up to this conflict. Like Sunni Islam was so weakened that the Shia were finally able to implement the geopolitical vision, creating a consistent Shia controlled area. Or no, let me rephrase that, connecting the Shia strongholds in like Lebanon and around the

mascus with the Shia strongholds in southern Iraq and Iran. And what you have today is Shia militias controlling the Sunni deserts, which is an which is an absolute nightmare for the future of the region. And what I would argue is that Rajava, America's mission with the Kurds, but also the other forces in SDF, in particular, the Sunni tribes, are. along the Syrian Iraqi border that are part of the SDF alliance and are part of America's proxy. That's one of the last frontiers. And I drew a map of this.

Like it's basically creating the last chokehole to a complete Shia crescent in the region. And that fact, so you have Rajava along the Iraqi Syrian border with the Sunni tribes as part of the alliance. And then around the Jordanian border, you have these all time mysterious mission where they're supposedly where America wants to. create safe haven for refugees, but it's like apparently 200 special forces. That's an anti-Iranian mission. So basically at this point, America narrows down and this one bit, they narrowed down the Shia crescent to two border crossings. And without Rajava, without SDF, Iran wins.

The whole Syrian-Iraqi border would be suddenly open to Iranian influence, and that's going to be the next war. And any Americans who wonder why we still have American forces. forces in Syria is still special forces guys over there. I thought this war was about ISIS. What are they still doing over there? Well, you just offered the perfect answer. Yes. You don't fight. Look, like after like after Trump announced, we withdrawing from Rizava, the next day went like, oh, no, we're not. We're coming back with Abrams tanks. Well, you don't need Abrams tanks against sleeper cells. You need Abrams tanks to deter Russia and Iran and as

Ebola. That's what they for, in my opinion. And again, like I've been there, been hanging out with these Iranians and Mosul. Tell us, tell us about that, Baz about, you were there for the Battle of Missoull with the Sharia. Yeah, it was like, yeah, for the Battle of West Missou, like when it kicked off, I was very weird. We were like, like, it was like, you guys know this. I was missing war, right? And then this dude would came up and said, I want to go to Mosul, do some medical stuff.

I was, yeah, sure. So we flew to Musul. And there were a few Americans there that set up things and yaddi, yadi. It was like me and a bunch of other guys, and we didn't have any Americans on the team. So it's like, okay, you guys go with Iraqi Armed Forces 9th Division. I'm like, sure. Turns out Iraqi's 9th division was in the Shia militia-controlled desert west of Missou. So while there was fighting in the city and fighting in like other cities around it, the Shia militias would advance in the countryside and just take it.

they didn't care about the cities. They would be after the highways, the road leading, especially from east to west, and they would hold them with their proxies. And like, I was there under the, or my team was under the protection of the Iraqi forces. So we would be just driving around after a few weeks in our own high luck, just dealing with the Iranians, dealing with Quds. Like, there were Quds Force guys. they worked their way through kill lists right next to us. And like no America,

this was a place where Americans couldn't necessarily go. Like the Americans, one of your airborne's was there, and they would just rush through in armored convoys, with these Iranians just spitting in front of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, guys run the show. The Iraqi special forces with U.S. U.S.A.

were liberating Mosul and dying there. like ridiculous numbers, the Shia militias just grabbed the countryside between the cities. And they were like, we were there when they started conducting these hearts and minds missions. On the one hand, on the one hand, you would have like informants with belloclavas, selecting ISIS suspect from the refugees from the city, the Kud's force would drive them in the desert and come back with an empty truck, all of that shit. And then at the same time, you would have like a Shia imams from like Nudgev in the south, up and distributing bucklevard and candy to like the refugees.

Yeah. It's one Iraq. We welcome you. It was a, it was a, it was a very brutal carrot and stick approach. Yeah. Where, where Iran took control of these deserts. Yeah. And like I couldn't stay there for long because it wasn't my war.

Like I'm a German intellectual. I don't want to talk about a second Holocaust with Iranians. That's right. That's not what I enjoy. So, and it was getting a bit messy. We get asked by like Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, the UN to collect intel there. And you start taking pictures of things. You don't want to take pictures of.

And you have your thing. Yeah, you know, and it's like, we weren't spying for anyone, but we didn't want any informant see us with the UN. And then next day with next to the Quds Force. Like it was just, it was, I didn't enjoy that conflict, although it was exciting. But it was a completely different war, even though it was the same enemy at the same time.

Right. How do the Kurds feel about, like, NATO and the UN being that really it's that, it's like, it's, you know, Turkey's involvement with the West that keeps the Kurds, you know, kind of from being formalized, right? Or am I wrong? Yes, no, absolutely. You're absolutely right. short answer the Kurds love the Americans. Like historically, American foreign policy did betray the Kurds

quite a few times. Sure. The Kurds absolutely love the Americans there, absolutely love them, because they know if America becomes a Kurdish hegemon and has this like protecting hands, wings in form of the, you know, various jets and drones over Kurdistan. Kurdistan prospers. If America withdraws, Islamists, the Assad's, the Turks angry dudes with beards take over and squash the revolution. Like I think at this point, the Kurds are strong enough because of Western support. Like talk to people in Rojava, it's one big tunnel. You don't want to go in there as a Turkish military, as a conscript army. The Kurds learned a lot from ISIS's urban guerrilla fighting.

They have the right equipment to defend themselves. And yet it needs America to secure Kurdistan. That's a reality of things. Without America, the Kurds aren't around anymore. Since the Battle of Missouil and the fall of Raqqa, a lot has changed in Rajah. There have been some Turkish incursions. I was wondering if you could at least somewhat briefly give us a sort of status update on where this region is today. Well, Rajava is being basically Rajava is being surrounded by its enemies.

So they want to squeeze it. Iran wants it. because they want America out. Like U.S. installations are being mortared in Rojava from Shia militias. It's also a place where American Kurdish patrols bump into Russian patrols on a daily base or by daily base. I know that the Kurds have very loose rules of engagement. So it's like Menbysh, which like, I think in like 2020, Manbiz fell back to the regime and the Russians. And like I think John and I almost got a hard attack.

like after all this dying, we just gave it to the fucking Russians. Yeah. I couldn't. I was fucking, I was furious. I couldn't believe it. But I guess a lot of U.S. servicemen and women that served in the Middle East, know that feeling. Anyways, but it's the enemies of this freedom project, of this democracy project, are pushing in from the north, from the east, from the west and the south. And frankly speaking, I doubt that policymakers in Washington understand what they have in Rojava.

I doubt that it's their last possible foothold, justified foothold in this part of the Middle East. An organic democratic movement in the Middle East in a viable partner force. Yeah, once you're out of there, you lost the Middle East, north of Jordan. I want to talk a little bit about life after war for the two of you. John, what was your kind of homecoming like? What was it like coming back to all of this? Well, I plugged right back into my, I've got a security company out in California. So as soon as I came back, I plugged right back into there.

Kind of, for the most part, pretended like Syria never existed. I just went right back into business. Completely ignored everything that had taken place. in Syria. And to be quite honest, it worked out for me for the most part. You know, I eventually got to

process everything months down the road, maybe closer to a year. But when I came back, I had business to handle. So I just plugged right back into that. All of the trauma, all of the negativity from

being at Rojava. It was just pushed to the side. And then on my clock, when I was ready for it, I processed it. So what caused you to leave? Like, when did you decide, was there a point when you said, I'm going home? Like, it's over for me? I'd say, after Mambesh, you know, I did the combat part of Mambesh.

and then I also volunteered on Faz's medical team. But once my time was done, I felt like my time, at least my time in the war to that point, I felt like I fulfilled my commitment. Yeah. Which technically I kind of did. I had to agree. It was like a six-month tour, so to speak, right?

Yeah, that second time was a six-month commitment. And did you feel that you got what you were missing when you left the Marine Corps, in terms of like that combat that was out there that you probably joined for? Certainly. Yeah. Absolutely. Yes.

I, yeah, I felt like I brought something at least to the volunteer group, you know, that I would not have been able to bring to combat or to a conflict zone in the Marine Corps. You know, granted, you'd be going back on a Mew. Still working security company out in California? Yes. But I also transfer it to Tampa.

Okay. The University of Tampa to finish out my degree in political science. Cool. International studies, you know. So I finished that in January. Awesome. So once I do that, my goal is to get back into the field just as a humanitarian rather than a combative. So.

Well, we should connect. you with Ryan Hendrickson. Yeah. And also, also Andy. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Ryan is a former Special Forces soldier who lost a leg in Afghanistan. And he keeps, he's over in Ukraine right now doing humanitarian stuff. He's handing out bags of rice to people. He's doing a demining like UXO.

He's doing really good stuff over there. Yeah, that's what I'd like to do. You know, I got to see what it's like going into those places. when you're doing it holding a rifle, you're on one side of the line. But when you're over there, like, you know, when I came back from Syria, I went to EMT school and have done some EMT work. And I got to see what it's like being on the other side of the line where you're not the bad guy. You're just trying to help. Right.

And I like that. So that's what I'd like to do, you know, moving forward. And how about you, Till? I mean, after all of this chaos and insanity, what was it like trying to return? back home. Yeah, I mean, it's like different to most guests on your show. I wasn't trained for any of this stuff, right? I didn't have any military training, didn't have any training in leadership,

in medical, like, combat medicine. And like, I couldn't ignore it. Like, I saw so many friends, like, we had so many friends die on our hands. We had so many children, like, die under my responsibility. And, like, with these mask has events, like, I would. I had to pull my medics of kids, of children that were, that were, were dead. And they wanted to do CPR. I was like, no, you can't.

Like, it's dead. We need to move on. Work with that. I, you know, these images about if you have three years, four years running through minefields, their skin is just ripped off the body. Like these images of seeing in the back of a kid, like the, the back being open, the lungs trying to work but couldn't and then we just tape it with duct tape because we didn't have materials like this like it is i couldn't shake it so my best response was like after two tours

and rojava fuck it i go to mozul and do more like wild west stuff um you know get get get some get some medical supplies on the baza buy some akas on the black market and just like it just go and see if we can drag a few kids out of shit and um I realized like in this desert in Missoule, like when you start yelling at like Shia proxy forces for being fucking idiots, it's time to leave. You overstay, you're welcome. And eventually even the Abrams tanks of the ninth division can't really kind of protect you. And see, you know, it's like, yeah, fuck it. I got to get out.

And like honestly, I'm, I fucked my academic career with this time there. to many of my former colleagues, I'm a combatant in a very bloody war. They don't shake my hands. They don't respond to my emails. So I'm sitting. I move to Canada, basically, get married here and live in a forest and write about these things and think. And yeah, that's basically me. And you said the United States government won't even let you in the country because of your

closer, your association, so to speak, with the Iranians? Yeah, I think it's, they just didn't know what to, like this is, most people don't know where to put me, where to place me in what box to put me. I'm not your, I'm not this German academic anymore, you know, the suburban kid. Like, you know, I'm, I'm like, American vet. I can talk much, much easier these days to American combat vets than to fellow academics. because of my experience and what I did. So for me, the best way to deal with it is live in the moment, enjoy life,

and be happy to be alive, be happy that the sun shines every day and that I'm not dead yet. And that I can do at best in a semi-offgrid life in the Canadian wilderness. I feel in the in the city I don't have the I can't really be in the moment it's just stress and traffic and appointments and so I'm still I don't have any of these post PTSD symptoms but I'd say I have PTSD symptoms like I have post-traumatic stress I saw horrible things I wasn't trained for it and I need to make sense of them sure it doesn't mean I have a disorder I'm perfectly fine but it's at yet it impacts me right and yet I need to make sense of it from an academic perspective and I need to rationalize it. And I need to rationalize what we did and what we didn't do and what we could do and we couldn't do. And yeah, I mean, many veterans know that. You make decisions in split seconds and then you have the rest of your life to think about it, right? So like when John talked about this ambush, like I still remember like half of his team got fucked up.

And specifically, you know, this old Russian APC would bring out some of the casualties to my medic team where we would rush in. And I remember, like, we had our minivan and would just drag all of our supplies out, make it a second improvised ambulance. We shove everyone in there, stabilize them, shove them in there. Some of the kids that were hit, Daesh used explosive rounds and that ambush. And I remember this kid, this Kurdish 16-year-old kid, he had his whole stomach. they had like two, three rounds to the stomach. They all exploded in there somehow. We tried to stabilize him and there was just this green goo coming out of the,

out of the bullet, the entry wounds and stuff. It's like, what did you do? Yeah, it's like, I don't have. And then, you know, you need to consider that the Rajavabets. We don't have a VA to go to. We can't. We don't have anywhere to seek out. There have been like quite a few suicides.

And yeah, it's tricky, although. But for me, the best way is to write about it and make sense about it, analyze it, put it into context. And yeah, try not to give in into the urge to go to Ukraine or somewhere. Do you guys, the volunteers, stay in touch with each other? Or do you guys stay in contact with the Kurdish communities in Canada or the United States? Very few, I'd say. Surprisingly few. Yeah.

You need, like the problem with the volunteers is we weren't a homogenous group either. There was, there was so much bitching. There was so much backstabbing. Yeah. There was so much envy. There was so much, oh, why do these left European, you know, the American combat ex-military guys would just be pissed off with a European leftist, making it to the front line because they knew the ideology and back and forth.

And there was a lot of envy. there was a lot of people got into arguments so there wasn't really this community you we didn't really get into it but the international volunteers as you say i mean it was a motley crew like there were some really good guys yeah but there were also some really bad guys you know that showed up there were guys that i mean you knew immediately they were assholes but guys showed up it later turned out they had like they were wanted for rape in the u.s or britain there were guys I had a guy on my team with an open arrest warrant for spitting at a cop. There were adventurous.

There was no vetting. Like anyone who wanted to say, well, it was on social media and thought like, oh, Syria, let's go that. It's sort of like the old French Foreign Legion, right? Like before they started doing their vetting. Want to get into some questions? Yeah. So we got some, we got some questions for you guys.

Why does Turkey's president, Erdogan, call the YPG a terrorist group? because I affiliated with PKK for fights to that fight since the early 80s for Kurdish rights and Turkey. And because Turkey's current president is an authoritarian leader who doesn't like dissent intellectual, practical anywhere. So to them, they're all terrorists. And from his perspective, it kind of makes sense. From our perspective, like John and mine perspective, it's ridiculous. But, like, terrorism is always a definition of, it's always about perspective, right? For the Turks.

Like, I was called by the Turkish tabloid, but I was called the leader of a group of gay terrorists, which I find hilarious. But they never liked us. I remember my, my ex-wife made a documentary about the Kurds in Syria. And the Turkish tabloids called her like a PKK horror or something like this. Like, yeah, that sounds like, off the rails. Yep. Yeah, and it is like from the Turkish perspective, it's a security nightmare.

So this is why they go in and want the security corridor, which means ethnic cleansing since the Kurds live at the Syrian Turkish border, and they're all being pushed south. Like the mountain people historically are being pushed into the Syrian Sunni Arab desert. They're completely out of place there. And thanks, Danny. I appreciate it. Tbar, thank you. Do you guys have any impression?

on the good and the bad of the American air support to the SDF. I don't have anything negative to say about the air support. They like I don't have, I can't compare it to any other conflict. But, you know, I mean, I, you know, when the war on terror started, I was at uni writing papers against it. Like from being a German intellectual and not necessarily side of the American military. Like the drone strikes in Pakistan and things like that. Well, that's a difference.

Yeah. The drone strikes in Pakistan are so different from the air support by the Kurds. Right. With the Americans, it's a completely different conflict. And there were flyovers to make sure there's not civilian targets. There was double checking. There were all sorts of, like, I never saw, like, I never saw an airstrike on civilians being conducted.

I didn't. I know that I think the New York Times has a lot to say about Rucker, et cetera. personally, I don't have, like, it was done as good as it could have been done in these circumstances. And it also worked to give the Kurds these airstrike apps, basically with a, with a, with a Google Maps and you click on a building. And, and, and, and the, and the, and the, the, the Kurds never abused it to settle old. Old debts or whatever. Yeah. And, and, um, the only civilian casualties, uh, I heard and this is more anecdotal evidence.

was that in basements, DASH-packed civilians, and basically in basements of buildings, for example, would, with DASH commanders would have their meetings. So when a bomb is dropped on these buildings and you come, go there and you look at them, it turns out there were like a few families in the basement. Right. And this is, but again, you know, I'm not a sport.

I sound like a sports person for the U.S. military. Right. But it's like ISIS knows exactly how to end a Western military mission abroad. Right. To create civilian casualties and the media in the U.S., Europe will say, you know, this is going sideways. And this is what DASH did that produced civilian casualties and airstrikes. That's not the fault of the bomber.

Like these civis were in there for days, weeks. Like if the building was watched by a drone before the strike, there was no engagement. They didn't know. They didn't know. Yeah. And then, yeah, this is how I. has produced casualties. Yeah.

And this is what they did. But this is, yeah, I mean, many of my, yeah, I sound a little bit like a spokesperson for the U.S. military in that conflict. I have nothing bad to say about it, which is very different to the general war on terror, which, you know, but again, I wouldn't criticize the military. It could put criticize U.S. foreign policy. And I mean, it's hard to, it's hard to lambast, you know, eight tens and one-thirties when they literally pull your ass out.

out of the fire like last minute. Absolutely. Like with the world disclosing in on your like, this is it. And then all of sudden, you know, it's like, her. It's like, yeah, I listened to your podcast with, what were the A10 pilot? Oh yeah.

Casey, killer chick. Okay. Oh, Jesus. She was the A10, the AC130 is William. Yeah. Yeah, I'll need to, I have that downloaded too. But yeah, we, John and I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for these machines. It's like anti-pilots flying.

Yeah. What about you, John? So the question was, do you have any impressions on the good and bad of American Air Support to the SDF? I don't think, I mean, it's a lifesaver. I don't think anyone understands until you see it in action or until it impacts you. But granted, the majority of Americans, it will never impact. but if it's explained to them in certain terms, you know, like being a Kurd, you know, an 18, 19-year-old Kurdish, you know, you're Turkish probably in, you know, ethnic origin, and now you're in Syria, and speaking from personal experience, there's a full mood, and now you see an A-10 floating by. And then it controls the night.

You just assaulted a building, whatever. It was this out of the daddy. And I remember looking out a window, seeing the A-10, and just watching it do its job and thinking, I'm happy to be paying tax dollars for this. Right, right. You know, it's something nobody, I wouldn't ever understand unless I saw it. But I remember assaulting this building and being, okay, I'm watching out here. and then watching the moon and seeing an A-10

just you know lining up to its shot and in the middle of the night and thinking this is what this is about uh yeah so yeah Americans

it's you'll never understand until you'll until it's laid out in front of you to be like hey people are going to die unless this this plane does what's got to do it But the Kurds, like the Kurds would say the same about us.

Sorry, John. The Kurds would say the same about us when the first wave of decisive air strikes were rolled out. Like me and Sean were outside Haseake. And we would see the valley between Haseake and the Abdelaziz Mountains. And like from one moment to another, like there was zero jets, the entire conflict. And then from one moment to the other, the sky was full with jets. And all over the valley, like everywhere. shit was blowing up.

It was like these, like bombs burning buildings. And the Kurds were like, wow. It's a religious experience, right? Yeah, absolutely. And they're all because. And air power shows up. Yep. Like, it's a religious experience.

Absolutely. Yes. And the Kurds were like the cult. It was under Obama's administration. And they were all like from one way to another, B.G. Haval Obama. Long live our comrade Obama. like this is what they would refer to the planes Haval Obama they were just grateful

because in the past many of these guys they knew what NATO weapons can do but they were used against them in the Kurdish mountains like the F-16s the Kurds knew were flown by Turkish pilots and they bombed the shit out of them and their families so for them it was like the same as for us

it was like wow like this is incredible yeah Paul thank you very much run into any ruses, any Russians? Yes. From my perspective, there was the bombing in Kamsulu,

which I was not part of, but there were some foreigners that were there. Yes. And they just, they, yeah. There was this very short moment in early 2016, when SDF was being formed. And again, SDF wasn't an American brainchild, it was a regional alliance. And America acknowledged that this is a very valuable alliance to have on your side, as Russians did the same.

So the capital in Rajavah is Kami Shlo, which is still a divided city. The regime still holds quarters in there. The regime still controls the Syrian regime, the Assad regime, a border crossing with Turkey, and they control the airport. So for this very brief moment, you had a bunch of these big Antonov planes come in. You would see Russians with these stripy shirts in Kamishlow. And they were negotiating with the Kurds. They were negotiating on who SDF is going to cite with Russia or America. And they sided with America eventually.

But Russia was there. And they wanted SDF desperately. They saw the potential the alliance has to control territory, to control space, to appease certain groups like the Sunni Arab tribes in Der Azoresa. Yeah, the Russian wanted the alliance. Russia also thought they were going to get like mad street cred for defeating ISIS in Syria. And the world actually didn't really give a shit about them. And well, you can see where they are today.

We'll say that's another podcast. Speaking of Russia, thanks again, Danny. Based on your experiences, what advice would you? you guys give guests, give to anyone considering volunteering to fight in Ukraine? Good question. Quite a few guys from quite a few friends of Ayas fought in Ukraine, right? There was quite a few guys went straight from Yepege to Ukrainian forces. Like, we actually like, you know, some of these guys, like this guy is from like John

Harding. There was a magnetic team later. He just got, he was in Maria Poole and got rearguard. He was six months and the Russians got him. He was in a P.O.W. camp. He just got out a few other busies. Bodies of ours just got out of P.O.W. camp from a Rio Paul. So, I mean, my advice would be you don't compare the conflicts.

That would be my advice. Like it's so, from what I can gather, it's so different in Ukraine than it was in Syria. that, like, do your homework before you go. That would be my advice, I assume. Yeah. John? It's, in my opinion, it's two totally different wars. Personally, I wouldn't want to sign up for the war in Ukraine.

Um, it's a bit, there is a lot more politics involved than it is, uh, in my opinion. I, I feel like the war, I guess ISIS and Syria was more of a just war. Uh, the Ukrainian war, I, it gets a little more technical. So, uh, and we have buddies, you know, Aidan Aislan, you know, some British gentleman who was, uh, recent, where he was, captured by Russian forces. It's

it's it's we're comparing uh apples and oranges I guess you could say. I don't think they're the same. It's really tough

to make a call. You know, I think the like I said, the call against ISIS, it was more of a just war. Ukraine. It's not. so cut and dry. And

clearly, when you're looking at what Russia's willing to do, it's not so easy. And when you say what they're willing to do, because I mean, ISIS was willing in terms of like what they would do to people. Is that what you mean? Or, because ISIS, what didn't treat their captives well,

correct? No. Yeah. Well, like Aiden, our buddy from Syria. he was sentenced to death but the Saudi Arabian government stepped in and you know similar to John Harding I think

John Harding was sentenced to death and neither one of them actually received the death penalty but yeah it would have yeah with ISIS none of us were planning to get catch up right right like that just wasn't you always say one round for yourself

right yeah this is a ritual Every time your position gets overrun by ISIS, the spiel would be that you and your JEPAG, your Jeperjebodies would share a K-round symbolic in case you needed the most, meaning to evade capture. I got my hand on two fracronades. I had one for the enemy, the other are called Alamo, and I would just pull the pin and shoved it under my body armor.

Yeah. But we weren't going to get captured. Yeah. That was just not an option because there would have been no one pressing, buying us out. It would have been a very slow and painful death on life leaks. Yeah. Bad Boy Leamy Channel, thank you very much for the very generous donation,

said, next bottle is on me. And we will buy a bottle with that. Eric L, thank you very much. Amazing info. And it really is, guys. Like, we really, really appreciate you guys coming in and sharing. like this is something that's so far out of the I'll say for the general American and I'm probably the general European

like the military is one step removed like most people don't have an idea and this is this is another step removed because you're out there fighting in a different culture without the support that Western you know the Americans Western Europeans generally have without our military structure you're just there to fight the good fight to keep people from literally getting the worst things that you can imagine happening to people that's what's happening i have a couple extra questions here brandon asks did uh did either of you work with an older frenchman he was there from 2015 to 2017 wounded during the battle of topka and was clearing houses in raka in

2017 he used to fight in croatia in the 90s yeah i believe so you have a name uh i don't have have a name though i'm sorry yeah i think there were quite a few there were quite a few older frenchmen um showing up and they were all like most of them were former legioners yeah um yep but there were i i i'm not sure if i there was one guy i remember but he was uh later was k i in man bern bhae so maybe i'm mixing them up um but yeah there would be quite a few french dudes coming rotating in and out um one last thing on air strikes. Someone asking, do you have any impression specifically about drone strikes

during your time in Syria? Not so much. Okay. I was impressed. Yeah. I remember spending nights sleeping on rooftops. And just watching off in the distance what I thought were shooting stars. We're not shooting stars. Were you making wishes?

I was just watching. Watching stuff light up and and bringing it to other people's attentions and realizing like, no, that's the next battle. Like that, that's far off in the day. I think this was the Alshaddi operation. But that's off in the distance. But that's the next, you know, that's, those aren't shooting stars. Yeah. Those are shooting Uncle Sam.

So, I, sorry, ISIS actually used quite a few drones in Muzu, which was a real nuisance. They would do the same that Ukrainians do. They would bury like commercial drones and put like 40 mic mics underneath them. And like every time you would hear this lawnmower sound in the sky is like, ah, fuck, that's a dash drone. So you go inside and hide. Yeah. They would try to hit, they would hide, try to hit all the medical stations and stuff. So if they see a bunch of ambulances park, that's a prime target.

Like, how do you guys find yourselves now? Because, you know, you were a German academic who saw combat, which I would say that most academics from any country don't experience that. And, you know, you were, you know, a United States Marine with and raised in this culture, not raised, but, you know, grew up in the idea of the Marine Corps in this culture of combat, but also a very specific type of combat with very ordered and whatnot. How has this experience changed your view of the world, your view of combat, your view of the United States or Western culture, whatever it is? How has this, if it has changed you? It has changed. To me, the experience of war has changed most things in life. Like, just the perspective on life, it changed and what I want from it.

Like my academic career just was not important afterwards. Money or status symbol just lost importance afterwards. And that's the beauty of this war zone. When you were there, and again, I sound like an American, like the war movie, but when you're there, you really just care about your friends, you're with. That's all that matters. You care about your buddies and you care about the kids you get out of the fighting. This is all that matters.

everything else is secondary and it makes the world so wonderfully easy right and it it divides it into right and the rest um and i love that this is why this is why i miss war and this is why i think many people miss war and the fighting because um it gets simple and um you make a difference and um you know you don't work on a silly paper, maybe 20 experts on the planet going to read that is not going to have any impact whatsoever besides your CV. All of this lost complete relevance, at least to me. And my life goals changed. Yeah.

And my view of North America changed, quite frankly. In what way? Like America, like when you come from European academia, political science, geography, sociology, American foreign policy and the associated U.S. military or British military aren't necessarily the good guys. It gave me a completely different perspective on the people that fight wars and the kind of guys that show up to these places. And we said there's a few funny guys that showed up, but essentially there were some of the best guys I've ever met. They didn't have any university degrees, there were like shelving at Walmart. And yet there were the most solid guys.

I would like, I'm so glad that I met. And like, you know, the same for the U.S. special and the British special forces guys, the French special forces guys. They were all like solid guys. Like, I just love to hang out with them. You know, this is one when people try, when people ask me, like, like German civilians, like, what's it like? I'm like, these goods are incredible. But like I would overhear, you know, the Special Forces guys on the set phone with a family. And they were just, they were like, their bodies were mortaring ISIS calling in airstrikes. And they were talking their wife down from a bad day in the office. I'm like, holy fuck, who are you?

Yeah, it's just to me, it's. And having had the opportunity to see America's military machinery be on the side of a grassroots. roots, democratic, feminist revolution. I'm just so fucking proud to have been there to see the short moment in history where everything was good, where history was just good, where the right people got the right support and bad people were like burning. And yeah, I was there and I saw it and I played a tiny, tiny part of it and it makes me incredible proud.

It makes me incredibly proud to have fought with a Yepeje, like having fought with this all female militia like defines me right if if it wouldn't be for the yeah pege john and i would have been just two more guys with a case in syria with the yeah pege we fought for something and we're essentially revolutionaries it's interesting because i i've told people the almost exact same sentiment as you before how much i loved combat because it's you're not worried about social pressure you're not worried about taxes you're not worried about you know what you're wearing like you there's no or no concerns, it's pure. You don't want to get shot.

Yeah. It's a weird combination. Yeah. And what about you, John, in terms of like how it molded your experience and did it change you in your perspective of the world, the U.S., whatever? I'd say it certainly did. My perspective of the world, you know, there were certain perspectives that still stick with me, positive and negative.

that I absorbed from being over there. I'd say, yeah, I'd say, as for, like, the negative, you, you, you, you learn to understand the negatives and how to process them, especially in terms of, like, trauma and all that. it's you take what is dealt to you and then you

learn to process it I would say in a beneficial way maybe not for everybody but at least for myself you know at least in Syria when it comes to the trauma

you know we saw a lot of like medical trauma but I'd say to me me, the worst part of it was when I would talk to the Yepigay or Yepichet

and they didn't see light at the end of the tunnel. They maybe were not suffering physically. But they didn't see an

end point for themselves after the war. They didn't see where they were going after the war. Right. And that to me, that hurt the most. The kids never talked about an after the war. Right. Yeah.

You ask these kids, what are you going to do next? What are you goals? And some of the 16-year-olds say, I want to die. I want to be Shahid, martyred by the time I'm 27. It's like, because also we need to understand, like, and this is what I struggled with and many others, the Kurdish culture is so different in the Middle Eastern culture to our, perspective where individual life costs is worth so much, right? For the Kurds is the survival of the Kurdish nation. The individual life doesn't rank that high. The same with some of these

Arabs fighters. Like when I these days read up on Shahid culture in Islam, I'm like, you idiot went there as a medic. It's a completely different culture and so many of us guys had like problems dealing with. But then again, these kids are realistic enough to know that this this conflict isn't over for them. And it's not. You told me some of the foreigners even, like, embrace the Yolo culture. Yeah. Well, that is Shaheed, right?

Shaheed, for those of you don't know, like Arabic or whatever, it's martyr. To be a Shaheed is to be a martyr, which is to die in service of something else. Yes. It's, yeah. Whether it's your life. Right. But it's not like different, like it sounds like, oh, okay, it's the same in any military. Well, the difference is a little bit like slightly that dying is.

for some is actually the goal. They're not planning to grow old. They're not planning to survive these wars. Right. And to them, it's like we all fucked off again, but like once we left, Turkey went in. Once we left and the regime and Russia went in and pushed. Once we left, they, you know, so they,

they were wrong in a sense. Like when we were at Mosul, I would talk to the ninth division of the Iraqi security forces. So guys, what's going to be after Mosul? they're like, well, we're going to fight the Pishmerga and Kikuk. They did. They fought Pishmerga and Kukuk. There were their buddies before. Daesh was gone.

Now we want Kikok and the oil back. It's like, there's no end. They're just like interludes into the dying and fighting. Right. And yeah, they're going to, they're, they're, they're, like when we left, they were dug, they were starting to dig tunnels to stop the, the Turks come coming in from the north, right? Yeah. When Darsh was kind of, yeah. It tends to be a very.

fatalistic culture, right? Oh, unbelievably. Yeah, very fatalistic where like Western forces, especially the American mentality is, I'll die from my country, but that's not the plan. Like I'm going to I'm going to kill everybody else from my country. But in those cultures,

you know, the whole inshallah, if God wills it. Yes. You know, it's everything is like, well, everything's in God's hands, so whatever. Yes. Well, the cuts in Syria I wouldn't say that necessarily because they're not very religious, but they're also very realistic, which, like, and, you know, if you go to the region, it's also a very happy society,

a very in the moment society is like, hang on, why meet tomorrow? We might be dead. Let's see today. Right. Right. What time? I don't know, whenever we get there. Yeah, exactly. It's like you do, you do many you do things in the moment it's warm it's open-hearted it's like you show up at a random village in the middle of nowhere as a group of europeans and these villagers that have nothing to eat themselves invite you and share the little they have yeah and it's like such a there's no it's such a warm-hearted society i always i i felt very much at home there because knowledge, academia, science was had, you know, people loved it, people lived in this moment, people enjoyed life while they were still alive. And then it could switch with incredibly suffering

and tragedy in a moment. And then revert back. It's, yeah, they would like every time it would go into battle, the yeah, pege would open the doors of their Toyota Hyluxes and blast Kurdish music from the speakers, dance. Just enjoy life. Just enjoy life. Because tomorrow we might be dead. There was nothing like tens or pumping each other up and kill, kill, kill. You know, when you rode in battle, it was music, it was dancing, it was peace signs, it was kids coming out to the roads and waving at you. And it's beautiful.

Well, guys, I really hope that you'll go and check out the book, America's War in Syria, fighting with Kurdish anti-IS forces by John Baz. And I'm sorry that Sean wasn't here, but you guys should pick it up and hear some of his stories in the book that are pretty incredible. He got to spend a little bit of time in prison and Kurdistan, amongst other adventures and misadventures. So I hope you'll go take a look at the book. Thank you both of you for joining us. And we'll be back next Friday with, I can't even say the name of our guest on Friday. He did a lot of undercover work with the DEA. and because of some of the threats.

So you can't pronounce it or we're just not allowed to? I literally cannot say it. And his identity will not be revealed on the show. And just so you guys know how important this is like Jack and I for a long time have had a policy of not allowing anonymous people to come on our show because we didn't want the challenges credibility. But we know this guy's real. We know his stories are real.

Like we know and we are allowing it. because there's credible threats on his life with various organized crime groups that would like to smoke this guy if they had the opportunity. So that's going to be next Friday. I hope to see you guys there. Again, thank you, Baz and John for taking the time for this. Yeah, we really appreciate it. I mean, this is like a really unique interview like Dave was saying, like this is a message and a story that most Americans just have no knowledge of whatsoever. So I'm really happy to get it out there a little bit.

Thanks for having us. Absolutely, guys. Is there anything you guys want to plug before we go, aside from your book? Your security company? Not so much. Okay. Are there any charities? You said you're writing a book right now.

Do you have a working title for it? Yeah. How Iran defeats America from Mossadegh to Rajava. It's a bit provocative, but, um, Unfortunately, unfortunately, it's correct, you're politically speaking. Yeah. All right. No, so how Iran defeats America.

And then are there any charities or organizations either you want to plug? No. I mean, John and I working on one at the moment, but it's nothing to say to talk about yet. When you guys are there, let us know. We'll plug it even if you're not on the show. Awesome. We'll do it again. All right, guys.

Thank you. And we'll see you next Friday. Thanks, everybody. All right. Take care. Thank you.