With the Kurds in Syria

"About 100 YPG [male] and YPJ [female] soldiers sat around the sides of the road smoking cigarettes and chewing sunflower seeds. It was a straight shot to the city that stood two kilometres away and was blossoming in mushroom clouds, each one proceeded by the heavy thud of a coalition airstrike."
"We were eventually moved to a small village where two platoons were waiting for the order to move. There were eight of us Westerners and we were split up between the two platoons at random and I was moved back and forth between them until they had the numbers right. A few hours from then over half of one of those platoons would be killed or injured in the battle for Telumis. I happened to be placed in the other platoon."
"Much of the YPG consists of teenagers, and many of the older ones have been fighting guerrilla wars in the mountains and now in the desert since they were barely teenagers themselves."
Canadian volunteer soldier Brendon Glossop, 26

Brandon Glossop, seen here, in a photo uploaded to a Facebook fan page
Brandon Glossop Facebook page

The Kurdish fighters in Syria, like the Kurdish peshmerga in Iraq have among them, as Mr. Glossop described, teens, many of them battle-hardened through previous battlefield experiences. They're now engaged in battling the Islamic State terrorists for possession of Iraqi and Syrian territory. The young Canadian man, formerly with the Canadian military, had decided, like a handful of other Canadian men, to travel to Syria to join the Kurds in their struggle against the jihadists.

During the First and Second World Wars, many young men barely into their teens volunteered to go overseas to fight on behalf of their homelands, for democracy and liberty. Now, Western sensibilities are horrified at the thought of teens taking part in combat. Yet in the Middle East there is nothing new about very young men taking part in conflict. Certainly al-Qaeda and Hamas and Hezbollah, to use a few examples, conscript teens into their fighting contingents.

Which brings to mind Canada's infamous Khadr family; the family patriarch a personal friend of Osama bin Laden, and a fundraiser for al-Qaeda. He took his family to Afghanistan to ensure that his three sons had the opportunity to become jihadists, to be enrolled in jihadi camps, to learn the proper handling of weapons, and how to improvise explosives. His youngest son, Omar Khadr, to this day an unreconstructed member of al-Qaeda who has never expressed remorse for killing a U.S. army medic, is spoken of as a child-soldier wronged when he was treated as a terrorist.


Young Mr. Glossop explained to an interviewer that within ten days of arriving in Syria from Edmonton, he was faced against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham in battle. The British Columbia native served in Afghanistan with the Canadian Forces, and he decided to put his military training at the service of the Kurds. He maintains a Facebook site, and has written of Kurdish forces "cleaning house and coalition gunships are putting on a fine show". 

He describes entering abandoned villages to find "nothing but bodies and ISIS propaganda still taped to the walls, most of it dictating how women were to dress under hard-line Sharia law". He wrote about a camp dog standing guard at a door outside a facility where wounded YPJ fighters were recovering. Before the Kurds had liberated the area, ISIS had kept the dog tied with a wire slip note leaving him with a "bright red, open wound that stank of infection".

The dog, like people who have been abused and traumatized "growled and snapped" at men with guns.