SINCE the beginning of the “Rojava revolution” in northern Syria in 2012, volunteers have travelled from outside the region to join the predominantly Kurdish “People’s Protection Units” (YPG) in their fight against Isis and their work to transform the territory into a democratic experiment that espouses women’s liberation, ecology, as well as ethnic and cultural tolerance.

In 2015 the volunteer phenomenon consolidated into the International Freedom Battalion (IFB), an alliance of communist parties alongside anarchist groups, that urged overseas combatants to join its ranks in the spirit of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.

Today, volunteers from across the world — including France, Ireland, Spain, Iceland, the US, England, Scotland, China, Canada, Germany and Turkey to name only a few — have fought, with roughly 50 killed in action alongside an estimated 100 fallen members of the Turkish parties that make up the majority of the IFB.