“If I kill one fighter, then coming here has been worthwhile”

Islamic fundamentalists aren’t the only Britons heading east to fight in someone else’s war. Matt Blake went to meet some of the British volunteers risking everything on the other side of the front line

The battle had raged all day. By the time Kurdish Peshmerga forces had driven Isil from the town near Hammam al-Alil, on Iraq’s northern front – now a cluster of bullet-ridden walls and burnt-out cars – just two jihadis remained. It was a warm evening last November when Ben, 30, a gas and plumbing engineer from Fife, first saw them stumbling through no man’s land, arms raised in surrender. He expected them to make martyrs of themselves, but instead they begged for mercy. “They appeared in the field wearing tracksuit bottoms and fake-leather jackets,” he recalls. “The Kurds were yelling at them to keep their hands up as they shouted in Arabic: ‘Don’t shoot, we’re innocent.’” They claimed to be farmers. But we frisked them and found about 40 home-made…

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The Week United Kingdom (Digital) - 1 Issue, V. 1076

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