By Hummam Sheikh Ali
DAMASCUS Richard Sherman Youth Jersey , Nov. 12 (Xinhua) -- After witnessing the crimes and atrocities the Islamic State (IS) group was committing in Iraq and Syria, Mustafa decided to leave his life in the United States and join the Kurdish fighters to battle the IS in predominantly-Kurdish areas in northern Syria.
"My name is Mustafa Rojava, which is my nom de guerre, my Kurdish fighting name. I came here because I wanted to kill IS because my feelings about them is that they are a scourge on the humanity," Mustafa said using the last name Rojava, which is the Kurdish name of the de facto Kurdish autonomous region in northern Syria.
Mustafa said he started developing anti-jihadi feelings since the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S., adding that his enmity feelings grew bigger when he started witnessing the actions of the IS group in both Iraq and Syria, particularly the crimes of the IS against the Yazidis, a Kurdish religious community in Iraq.
"I had never heard about the Yazidis before, but now I heard about them after learning how the IS murdered them and attacked their peaceful areas in the Sinjar Mountain in Iraq. The IS murdered their little boys, raped their women and daughters and sold them as sex slaves in the markets," Mustafa said.
"That was the turning point in my life," he added.
After deciding it was time for him to try to contribute to the battles against IS, Mustafa said he flew from Los Angeles to London and took another plane to Istanbul, Turkey, where he crossed over to the Sulaymaniyah area in Iraq.
"I met with the Kurdish fighters in Iraq and then entered Syria illegally. I have been here for months now," he said.
On why he chose to fight alongside the Kurds, Mustafa said the Kurds are friendly to the Western people, and that is a main reason why he is fighting with them, particularly with the People's Protection Units (YPG).
"The West has a really strong partner here," Mustafa said, calling on the Western countries to give the Kurds weapons.
"The Kurds are good allies to the West, and when we give them weapons, that would never go into an Arabic extremist hand, because they want to have peace in this little land with their Arab neighbors," Mustafa said, reflecting the view of many Western countries, mainly the U.S., whose air force has repeatedly backed the Kurdish fighters in their battles against the IS.
Mustafa is one of hundreds of foreign nationals who have decided to join the Kurds in Syria. Those fighters have recently been organized into the so-called "International Freedom Battalion."
The YPG spokesman, Salah Jamil, told Xinhua that the foreign fighters have been joining the YPG forces in northern Syria for quite some time, adding that some of them were killed during the battles.
"They have an active role in the battles that are ongoing in northern Syria," he said, adding that there is no accurate number of the foreign fighters, "but there are hundreds of them."
"They are volunteers from different nationalities and their aim is to fight IS. They are also fighting on several fronts," Jamil said.
Ayham Meri, a Syrian activists based in Syria's northern province of Hasakah, where considerable swathes are controlled by the Kurds, told Xinhua that most of the foreign fighters are Canadians, Americans and Britons, adding that some of them are even celebrities.
"One woman came to fight with woman division in the YPG and she was a model," he said.
Meri said the foreign fighters come to join the Kurds under humanitarian banners, noting that many of them have military experiences and come either to fight or to provide training to the Kurdish fighters.
He said the foreign fighters started pouring in to fight alongside the Kurds after the 2014 wide-scale attack by the IS on the Kurdish city of Ayn al-Arab, or Kobane, in the countryside of Aleppo province in northern Syria close to the Turkish borders.
Maher Ihsan, another activist who has spent some time reporting on the Kurdish issue, told Xinhua that "there are several types of foreign fighters; the first is those who believe in the rightness of the Kurdish cause and their right to have their autonomy, others who want to fight IS everywhere, and the third type is Western people who are actually spies for foreign agencies."
Ihsan said that the foreign fighters have more of a symbolic value than a real one on the battlefields, placing their number at no more than 500.
He added that those fighters often stick together and receive special treatment by the Kurds.
"They eat chicken and meat and have internet access," Ihsan said, noting that the source of the foreign fighters' funding is murky.
The presence of foreign fighters in Syria is not something new. It has become a growing trend, as each party of the conflict has a foreign backer.
The Syrian government forces are backed by the Shiite Lebanese Hezbollah fighters, along with other Shiite fighters from Iran and Afghanistan, not to mention the recently established Russian airstrikes in Syria against the militant groups.
The IS also has thousands of foreign militants driven to join the terror-labeled group by the propaganda of establishing an Islamic Caliphate in Syria.
Other rebel groups are either supported by the West, like the rebels' Free Syrian Army, the Ahrar al-Sham Movement and the Islam Army, which are mostly active in the countryside of the capital Damascus and Aleppo.
But for the Kurds, the Western support is essential either by U.S.-led airstrikes or foreign fighters joining the ground Kurdish troops.
The Kurds, who pose some 15 percent of Syria's 23 million inhabitants with most living in the north of the embattled country, tried during the conflict to keep their areas immune from military operations and retain the kind of "autonomy."
In mid-2012, Syrian troops withdrew from the majority of the Learn More About Estate. Cheap Jerseys Wholesale Soccer Shirts China Wholesale Hoodies Cheap NBA Hats Free Shipping Cheap MLB Hats Free Shipping Wholesale Jerseys Wholesale Jerseys Wholesale NFL Jerseys Wholesale NBA Hoodies Wholesale NHL Hats