Hats off…

Via AFP:

Decked out in his US army-issued fatigues and a lip stud shining from his mouth, the young American fighter cuts an unusual figure in the northern Iraqi town of Al-Qosh.

He served in the US army in Baghdad in 2006-2007 and has now returned to fight the Islamic State jihadist group with Dwekh Nawsha, a Christian militia whose name is an Assyrian-language phrase conveying self-sacrifice.

The 28-year-old, who goes by the pseudonym Brett, has become the figurehead of an emerging movement of foreigners coming to Iraq to support Christian groups.

Bearing a tattoo of a machinegun on his left arm and another of Jesus in a crown of thorns on his right, Brett jokingly refers to himself as a “crusader”.

IS never captured Al-Qosh — but it came close enough for its mostly Christian population to flee to the neighbouring autonomous region of Kurdistan, together with tens of thousands from Mosul and the Nineveh plains.

“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” Brett says, speaking from a Dwekh Nawsha base in the Kurdish city of Dohuk.

“But here we’re actually fighting for the freedom of the people here to be able live peaceably, to be able to live without persecution, to keep the church bells ringing.”

The mass exodus that took place in mid-2014 has put the continued existence of one of world’s oldest Christian communities into question.

With Kurdish peshmerga fighters now clawing back land around Mosul, some Christians are keen to take up arms for their survival and Dwekh Nwasha is only one of several recently formed groups.

Also acting as a recruiter, Brett says he wants to establish a “foreign fighters’ battalion”.

In his first week in charge, he brought in five volunteers from the United States, Britain and Canada, all of whom he says have military or contracting experience.

The foreign contingent is tiny compared to the thousands of foreigners who have joined IS, but interest is growing and Brett says he has 20 more volunteers already lined up to join.