Kurds have a simple ROE, kill or be killed.
Via NY Times
Last fall, Patrick Maxwell, a 29-year-old Iraq war veteran now selling real estate in this bustling city, saw something in news footage of Islamic fighters in Iraq that he never saw as an infantry Marine there: the enemy.
“We patrolled every day, got shot at, mortared, hit by I.E.D.s, one of my friends was killed,” said Mr. Maxwell, a former sergeant who deployed in 2006 to Anbar Province. “But I never saw the enemy, never fired a shot.”
With the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, hoisting its black flag above many Iraqi cities that United States troops spent years working to secure, he saw a second chance. He connected with a Kurdish military officer online, packed his body armor, some old uniforms and a faded green ball cap with a Texas flag patch on the front, and flew to Iraq.
Within days, he was on the front lines as a volunteer fighter with Kurdish security forces, known as the pesh merga, in northern Iraq, peering through a rifle scope at ISIS fighters as bullets whizzed past.
I may not be enlisted anymore, but I’m still a warrior,” said Mr. Maxwell, who left the Marines with an honorable discharge in 2011. “I figured if I could walk away from here and kill as many of the bad guys as I could, that would be a good thing.”
Mr. Maxwell is one of a small number of Americans — many of them former members of the military — who have volunteered in recent months to take up arms against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, even as the United States government has hesitated to put combat troops on the ground. Driven by a blend of motivations — outrage over ISIS’s atrocities, boredom with civilian life back home, dismay that an enemy they tried to neutralize is stronger than ever — they have offered themselves as pro bono advisers and riflemen in local militias.[…]
While the United States authorities have tracked and prosecuted citizens who try to join ISIS, it is unclear how they will respond to Americans’ fighting the group, especially since some Kurdish militias in Syria have ties to groups the State Department classifies as terrorist organizations.
Behind the scenes, American officials have pressured the pesh merga to keep Americans out of the fight, according to American military veterans who have been in Iraq. After being contacted by The New York Times, the pesh merga released a statement saying it would no longer accept foreign volunteers. Other militias are still accepting Westerners.
The fight against ISIS is not the first time Americans have joined wars independent of their military. Pilots flew for the Allies in World War I and II long before the United States officially declared war. In the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, Americans formed a contingent of more than 2,500 troops.
HT: Blueburb