I
found a 26-year-old American civilian named Clay Lawton standing alone,
just outside the village. Square-jawed, with large eyes and bright
teeth, he was a volunteer freedom fighter with the local militia. ‘‘I’m
from Rhode Island,’’ he said. ‘‘You know it? Most people confuse it with
Staten Island or Long Island.’’
While
we were talking, the unit he had arrived with drove off. Now he was
alone, wondering how he would find a commander and return to the action.
‘‘I guess you could say I’m free-floating,’’ he said.
‘Came all the way over here
for nothing. Seems like
such a waste of my life.’
for nothing. Seems like
such a waste of my life.’
Lawton
first heard about ISIS on ‘‘The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.’’ At the
time, he was lounging around Key West, driving tour boats from island to
island, going to parties, talking to girls. Three months later, he ran
out of things to do and bought a ticket home. He lived with his parents
and took a job painting houses, thinking he would start a career as a
carpenter. After high school, he spent a couple of years in the Army but
never deployed. He always wished he had. When a friend from boot camp
sent Lawton an email full of links to videos made by the Islamic State —
the execution of James Foley, clips from the day ISIS executed 250
Syrian soldiers in the desert — Lawton looked up ‘‘how to fight ISIS’’
on his lunch break.
A Facebook page called the Lions of Rojava
was recruiting foreign volunteers. It was affiliated with the People’s
Protection Units, known by the Kurdish abbreviation Y.P.G., the military
arm of a faction that since 2012 has controlled a sweep of land between
the Islamic State’s territory in northern Syria and Turkey. Rojava, as
the Kurds call it, is a place that didn’t exist until a few years ago,
when civil war in Syria opened up a front for Kurdish nationalism.
Lawton
sent the page a message, and within a day a Y.P.G. representative
invited him to join the fight. He had about $800 in savings. In
February, he flew to Norway and then to Dubai, and from Dubai to
Sulaimaniya, in Iraq. ‘‘From there I was really nervous,’’ he said. As
he spoke, Lawton sipped water from his CamelBak. ‘‘I thought everyone
was ISIS. I thought I was going to get kidnapped.’’ A fighter picked him
up in a fake taxi and took him to a safe house where another American
who was scared and lost was still hanging out, because he was so
desperate to get to the front. Lawton told him to come with him, and so
they went together.
Lawton
arrived in Syria, was given an M-16 and in just over two weeks was
participating in the offensive at Tel Hamis. ‘‘Fighting ISIS wasn’t
high-profile yet,’’ he said. ‘‘Wasn’t a big deal. Easy ride to the
front.’’
His
nom de guerre was Heval Sharvan, but the freedom fighters called him
Captain America. ‘‘I think, after this, I might want to relax and go
back to work,’’ he said. ‘‘Maybe New York or maybe Miami. Well, Miami
might be too chill.’’
Lawton
told me about the day he killed an ISIS militant. A Kurd gave him a
sniper rifle to attack an ISIS-controlled village. Lawton took a
position on the roof of a building and saw an ISIS fighter with a
rocket-propelled-grenade launcher running below. Lawton shot him.
‘‘The
guy just exploded,’’ Lawton said. ‘‘He was just gone.’’ Lawton still
had the rifle at his side, close to his body like a purse.
‘‘That was my first kill,’’ he said. ‘‘Kinda weird, but I had a nightmare that night.’’
‘‘About the militant?’’ I asked.
‘‘It’s
hard to explain,’’ he said. ‘‘You know these guys are animals, but even
with that knowledge … ’’ He trailed off. ‘‘You know you have to let the
brain figure it out on its own,’’ he said. ‘‘He pointed the R.P.G. at
me. He would have taken me and my friend. It was hard for me. Killing
people, you know you are here to do it. But then, when it happens, and
you see it. It’s different. He just exploded.’’
We
walked together up the road toward the village. Barley fields spread
for miles all around us. ‘‘A couple days later, I was good,’’ he said.
‘‘Ever since then, it’s been no problem. I just have to remember the
videos.’’
He
meant the videos of Foley, of the Syrian soldiers. He looked down and
softened the earth with his boot. ‘‘See,’’ he said. ‘‘I have a big
heart, and I never pictured myself actually doing it. I like to see the
good in everybody.’’
The foreigners were sleeping
in the villages, standing guard, burning trash, with no schedule and no
plans. They were easy to spot. The Irishman with bright red hair and
skin pale as the sky. Assorted Europeans who traveled in a pack. The
Americans with too much sunscreen and gear. Some were fresh to the
fight, and others had been on the ground for months.
At
the village where I met Lawton, another American walked alone up a dirt
road. The man was almost six feet tall, fair-skinned and balding with a
goatee. He was a 48-year-old Ohioan named Avery Harrington, though the
Kurds called him Cekdar. He was sweating but in good spirits. He drank
noisily from a water bottle. A purple-velvet Crown Royal bag that held
empty magazines dangled from his belt.
‘‘I’m 54 days over my visa stay,’’ he confessed.
Harrington
was in the Marines during the first gulf war but never made it to the
desert. Before arriving, he worked in the Ohio Department of
Transportation as a highway technician, plowing snow in the winter.
After connecting with the Lions of Rojava, he flew to Iraq in March 2015
with $10,000, body armor with steel plates, two canned hams, turkey
bacon, 25 pairs of clean socks and 10 packets of baby wipes. He was able
to cite the customs regulation — Section 126.17, Subsection F — that
allowed every citizen to take one full set of body armor, including a
helmet and gas mask, overseas. He paid more than $500 in baggage fees.
The hams never left Iraq.
In
April, when Harrington finally arrived in Syria, he was part of such a
huge influx of foreign recruits that the Y.P.G. started making special
units for Westerners, groups of roughly 12 soldiers. They went through a
kind of boot camp called the academy. Harrington was one of seven in
his class, including two other Americans, a New Zealander, an Iranian
and two Brits, one of whom was an actor named Michael Enright. They
trained together for just more than a week, learning to clean and
dismantle Kalashnikovs. Those with more experience, like Harrington,
were given PKC machine guns. Drills started at 6:15 a.m., and the men
sometimes practiced blindfolded to prepare for nighttime attacks.
Why
were the foreigners there? Some were escaping life back home. Others
were old soldiers, trying to fill a void. A few just had delusions of
grandeur. They came for the feeling of solidarity, or adventurism, or
they came to fulfill a childhood fantasy, to act out some violent
adolescent emotion. The youngest fighter was 19, and the oldest, I was
told, was 66, a former English teacher from Canada named Peter Douglas.
The veterans hoped to kill ISIS fighters and train the locals as they
had been trained in the Marines or the Army. The civilians, among them a
surf instructor and a philosophy student from the University of
Manchester, wanted to learn what they could. They hoped their stamina
was enough.
It
started the same way for each of them: watching the war on television,
then acting on their feelings of impotence and anger. They bought plane
tickets from Philadelphia or Miami or Washington and flew solo across
the Atlantic, following the orders of a Kurdish militant on Facebook who
barely spoke English. It was exciting; it turned them on. They were
there to help.
They
crossed borders to join a de facto state run by a socialist militia
with small arms, entering a battlefield where soldiers died of
preventable wounds and untrained medics made tourniquets from
broomsticks and torn blankets. The veterans had more experience with
weapons than the Y.P.G., who fought with light infantry and without
Kevlar. As one foreigner said, of a Kurdish unit, ‘‘I wouldn’t play
paintball in that outfit.’’ These Westerners were genuinely brave, and
yet the will to do good was not enough. The mind-set of the Y.P.G., some
realized, had little to do with their own beliefs. “This is the
Twilight Zone,” one said. “Lovely fairy tale,” said another. Many
realized, far too late, that this wasn’t a normal deployment. Ad hoc
organization, no advanced weaponry, no Black Hawk to airlift them to
safety, few translators. They had abandoned everything — jobs, children,
wives.
‘I have a big heart, and
I never pictured myself
actually doing it.’
I never pictured myself
actually doing it.’
Some
fought in combat, but many did not. What followed were purposeless
days, sleepless nights, and I sensed a bit of humiliation among them.
Like Marlow on his way up the Congo, these men seemed to experience a
disturbance in their Western consciousness. They had vastly
overestimated their use. Their service was respected but insignificant.
These were men who arrived with a stark idea of good versus evil, who
thought of themselves as heroes, and found themselves turning in
circles.
‘‘We perpetually give,’’ Harrington said. ‘‘And we are perpetually getting screwed.’’
In the months
after the first volunteers arrived in the fall of 2014, the foreign
fighters battled ISIS alongside the Y.P.G., but then they started dying.
By the summer, at least six foreigners had been killed, including one
American. The Kurds started using the foreigners for safer tasks — to
secure remote outposts or cover guard shifts in rear areas.
Jordan
Matson, a 29-year-old Wisconsin man who ran the Facebook page at first,
was among the few who continued to join the most dangerous missions. He
said he was the second foreign fighter to arrive. He had been in
Syria’s Kurdish territory for almost a year and was the darling of the
Western militia movement. He was so popular that one woman, writing on
Facebook, threatened to kill herself if he didn’t marry her. Another, he
said, tried to travel to Syria with her child to ask for his hand in
marriage.
I
met Matson while he was taking a break from sniper duty. We were in the
basement of an apartment building in Tel Tamer, a ghost town with
closed storefronts and dogs with cut-off ears. Matson was over six feet
and had a big jaw, a goatee and a childish grin. He wore full fatigues
and carried a Kalashnikov. I asked if he had time to talk. Yes, he said —
he had nothing to do. ‘‘If I have no one to play chess with, then I’m
going to stare at that wall,’’ he said. ‘‘And then I’m going to stare at
that wall. And when I’m done staring at that wall, I’m going to stare
at that wall.’’ Matson asked if I wanted any doughnuts or soda. He was
going to get something from a man down the street who worked at the only
operating store in town. ‘‘I have lots of money,’’ he said. He wouldn’t
say where the money came from except a ‘‘generous benefactor.’’
Harrington told me the foreigners were given a monthly allowance of
about $100 for their services from the Y.P.G., which they used for extra
food and toilet paper.
Before
the war, Matson had never been outside the United States. He was
working the third shift at a meatpacking plant in Wisconsin. He joined
the Army and served for a year and a half before being discharged.
‘‘Hey, we think you have PTSD,’’ he said his superiors told him. He
added, ‘‘But I don’t.’’ He was going through a divorce at the time; he
later decided he had an emptiness in his life because he hadn’t
deployed.
In
June 2014, after the fall of Mosul, he learned on Facebook about an
American named Brian Wilson. Wilson was in Rojava, fighting ISIS. They
connected online, and Wilson gave him his contacts and suggested a
flight route. That same month, Matson flew to Poland, then Turkey, and
then drove to a town on the Turkish border. There, a Y.P.G. fighter
picked him up in a fake taxi and drove Matson into Iraq. They stayed in
Erbil and moved around safe houses; Matson pretended to be a doctor.
They traveled deep into the mountains until they were able to cross the
Tigris River at night into Syria.
Things
happened quickly for him. There was no training and no induction.
Matson joined a sniper unit. The soldiers’ job was to attack a group of
ISIS militants who were firing mortars at a Christian police station. It
was a six-hour firefight. A Y.P.G. fighter died in a suicide bombing.
Matson was hit by a grenade and injured his foot. An ambulance ferried
him to the regional hospital in Serekaniye.
It
was there, bored during his recovery, that he worked on a page to
recruit foreigners to the Y.P.G.: the Lions of Rojava. The banner was an
image, altered with Photoshop, of foreign fighters. They were holding
guns on a hilltop next to a giant lion; behind them was the smoke of
ruined towns. It was news to most everyone that there was a
Western-friendly faction in Syria. So many queries came in from veterans
and nonveterans that he couldn’t deal with them.
Matson
passed on the responsibility for the page a while ago. Kurdish Y.P.G.
supporters run it and provide directions to prospective fighters on how
to apply: Simply submit a résumé and statement of purpose. So far,
Matson says, he has met about a hundred foreign recruits, but no one
keeps track of the numbers.
Because
of the language barrier, the foreigners couldn’t communicate well with
the Kurds who were supposed to manage them. Conflicts between difficult
personalities were allowed to fester. There were stories about drifters
and lunatics. A British man who petted the dead ISIS bodies. Another who
used his psychic abilities to hear ISIS fighters speak. One man
requested to go home because of a bad case of attention-deficit
disorder. Another said he understood what ISIS wanted and sympathized
with their cause. Another was known for looking around and saying, ‘‘Did
the C.I.A. send you?’’
When
Michael Enright, the British actor who trained with Harrington, joined
the foreign fighters, he became a source of controversy. Enright is best
known for his role as a deckhand in ‘‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead
Man’s Chest.’’ He also played Nick Libergal in Season 1 of ‘‘Law &
Order: L.A.’’ (In the show, the police find Libergal dead in a bathtub,
his body dissolving in quicklime.) Enright had wanted to fight in the
war on terror after Sept. 11, but his friends discouraged him. The rise
of ISIS offered him a second chance.
Matson
wanted Enright off the battlefield. He described Enright as ‘‘mentally
unstable’’ in a Facebook post. ‘‘Enright is a liability,’’ Harrington
told me. ‘‘He’s not just a danger to himself, he is a danger to
everybody out here.’’ The actor was considered reckless with weapons,
disassembling his Kalashnikov without checking that the magazine was
empty. At a meeting, Harrington asked who wanted Enright kicked out of
the class. Everyone raised his hand. After training, Harrington said,
their commander decided to keep Enright at the front but without a
fighting role. He wasn’t welcome in any unit. (When I later asked him
about the comments, Enright said he did fight but didn’t want to get
into any of ‘‘the gossip’’: ‘‘I think it helps ISIS. I hate ISIS.’’)
When
Enright was ostracized during training, ‘‘the last thing he told me was
this,’’ Harrington said. ‘‘ ‘Hope you don’t get a bullet in your head,
bro.’ I thought, Dude, if we see you on the front lines, we’ll put a
bullet in your head.’’
The dead man in
the village was lying on his back with his arms crucified, his lower
half twisted. It looked as if someone had stuck a plum in his eye socket
and left it to rot. The bomb tore a hole through his pants but
preserved his bright blue boxer briefs. His head was tilted slightly
back, and his upper lip had slid toward his nose, leaving him with a
permanent snarl.
‘‘I’ve seen more dead bodies working for the Department of Transportation in Ohio,’’ Harrington said.
‘‘This is my first,’’ I said. Harrington admitted it was his first in Syria.
‘‘Someone stole his sandals!’’ he said. ‘‘He had trekking sandals on yesterday.’’
We
hung out by the body for a while. Then Harrington decided to walk back
to the village center for water. A truck rolled up carrying crates
packed with flatbread and tomatoes on the vine. The soldiers gathered
around the truck and ate the tomatoes like apples.
‘‘I
hate this,’’ Harrington said. He was looking at the tomato he got for
lunch. ‘‘I love rib-eye. As soon as I leave here, it’s big old steak
time.’’ He had lost a lot of weight since he arrived, and he showed me
the Leatherman he used to poke new holes in his belt, which tracked the
progress of his diminishing waist.
‘‘You
know what I want,’’ he said. ‘‘I want this to be a seasonal job. Go
plow snow in the winter and fight ISIS in the summer.’’
We
finished our tomatoes, and Harrington started talking about how the
Kurds always threw rocks at the stray dogs. He said another fighter
almost shot someone over it the night before.
‘‘Who’s that?’’ I asked
‘‘He’s
the guy with the Mohawk. He’s from San Antonio.’’ He pointed to a man
with a sunburned scalp, who was crouching and barely visible in the
shade of a collapsed building. ‘‘That Texan has been here a bit too
long. Decent guy, but doesn’t know how to take a grain of salt. This is
their country, play by their rules. Don’t let [expletive] upset you. You
can yell, scream and get mad, and all you are doing is raising your
blood pressure.’’
The
Texan asked that I refer to him by his warrior name, Azad. He wore
Oakleys and a calculator watch. He had sold his gun collection to pay
for the trip to fight ISIS. He seemed disappointed in the whole journey.
‘‘I was driving a truck for the oil fields when I decided to come out
here. I got a job as a brick mason to try to get in shape. But it’s
frustrating,’’ he said. ‘‘The arrogance of the Kurds. They don’t know
little things that could be done to save their lives.’’ He spoke in a
sorrowful monotone.
He
had expected to be able to train the Y.P.G. But the Y.P.G. didn’t care.
They didn’t need a Texan coming to their country to explain how to
fight. Instead, they kept him on guard duty. Once they even told him to
drive an ambulance.
‘‘Came
all the way over here for nothing,’’ he said. ‘‘Seems like such a waste
of my life. I’ll never get the security clearance to go work the oil
fields again. They will do a background check, and Homeland Security
won’t like that I’m in a foreign militia. Work your whole life, finally
get to the point where you’re making good money and blow that aside to
do the right thing, and then when you get here, your hands are tied.
It’s a no-win situation. If you go home, you will hate yourself the rest
of your life, because maybe you could have made a difference.’’
To
escape the heat, we walked through some weeds to the shade of a ruined
home. ‘‘I wouldn’t go in there very far,’’ he said. The home was about
to collapse. It was full of the detritus of someone else’s life.
Scattered about the dirt were sticks and rotting clothes, the occasional
gleam of a wedding photograph.
‘‘The
people who lived here left with only their clothes on their backs,’’ he
said. ‘‘A lot didn’t make it out alive. I get choked up. Then you find
out the Kurds are looting and stealing. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve taken
things from houses. Food, rope, cellphones. Only reason I’m here now is
to kill daesh’’ — a derogatory word for ISIS fighters. ‘‘You know what
they do.’’
Azad
and I stepped away from the house and onto the road. It was around 4 in
the afternoon. Up the road to our right, a group of Kurds next to a
supply truck was yelling and grabbing at Harrington and another
foreigner.
‘‘Oh,’’ Azad said. ‘‘That guy.’’
It
was Michael Enright. He had been on the truck and had come to talk to
Harrington about bad-mouthing him in a Facebook post. Harrington, a
large man, put his arm around Enright, who was much smaller.
They
screamed at each other, but I couldn’t hear the words. Enright rammed
his head into Harrington’s face. Harrington swung his arm for a punch
but missed. The Kurds started the engine. Enright ran and jumped into
the truck bed. They drove off, and Enright stared out at us like a dog.
Harrington
ran down the hill. He was screaming and cursing. ‘‘It’s the [expletive]
British guy. He [expletive] head-butted me,’’ he said. A tooth had cut
cleanly through his lip. A rope of red saliva dangled from his mouth.
‘‘He shouldn’t have tried to be a fighter,’’ he said. ‘‘Piece of
[expletive], danger to everybody!’’
The
fight seemed to disturb Azad. The threat of the Islamic State loomed
over us, but the dramas of private life continued to take center stage.
‘‘Give up everything to come out here, and you’ve got these guys,’’ Azad
said. ‘‘They come here for personal reasons. Just trying to make
themselves look good back home. They are out here playing games and
risking lives.’’
Azad
wandered off and sat down on a rock across from the dead body. He
pointed at it and waved his hands. ‘‘Yeah we got daesh here for an
interview. Hey, yeah, why you go rape and murder women and children? You
just executed a 3-year-old?’’ The Kurds near him were laughing. He kept
saying it. ‘‘Hey want to interview a daesh? Daesh here!’’
He
wouldn’t stop, so I asked the corpse if he had anything to say. Azad
smiled and spoke for the dead man. ‘‘It’s not that bad,’’ he said. ‘‘Not
that bad being dead.’’
I walked with Harrington
to a neighboring village, where I would meet a driver who would take me
out of Syria. Clay Lawton was there, along with an Estonian, a Dutchman
and a Spaniard. I said my goodbyes and left. During the drive, a flat
tire stranded us on the bank of a river, and Lawton poked his head over
the truck bed. ‘‘Just catching a ride,’’ he said. ‘‘Mind if I go with
you guys?’’
We
rode in the bucket of a bulldozer across the river and then crawled up a
wet bank and entered a field of yellow barley. A thin road cut through
the field, and we hiked it.
‘‘See
that village over there?’’ Lawton said. He pointed to a pile of
concrete. ‘‘That’s where I shot the guy. Yeah, ISIS is right there,’’ he
said. ‘‘We should probably not be standing here since we’re within
sniper range. They’re probably looking at us right now. There still
might be some ISIS guys left.’’
A white cloud rose from the dead fields. ‘‘Oh, yep, that’s an airstrike. That means there are still some guys right there.’’
He dragged his arm up and pointed. Neither of us had slept much, and so we didn’t make the effort to move.
Another driver waited for us at the end of the road. Lawton jumped in the van. ‘‘Where exactly do you want to go?’’ I asked.
‘‘Doesn’t matter,’’ he said. ‘‘Just take me to America, or a combat zone.’’
His
plan was to change into civilian clothing and cross the border into
Iraq. But when we looked in his duffel, he had only fatigues. We made
one more stop, at the same location where he was first abandoned by his
unit. After discussing the plans, we decided that the political
situation was too tense to bring him across the border.
Lawton
started dropping his belongings on the ground: camouflage shirts, a
bundle of tank tops in a plastic bag. He would find a way out on his
own, he said, and wanted to lighten his load. I headed back to the truck
and looked back to see Lawton, alone again on the hill. His clothes
made a small trail behind him in the dirt.
Jennifer Percy is the author
of the book ‘‘Demon Camp: A Soldier’s Exorcism,’’ a New York Times
Notable Book in 2014. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
New York Times
New York Times
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