"War corrodes everyone."

Following in the footsteps of the volunteers who fought with the Spanish International Brigades eighty years prior, Warren Stoddard II traveled on his own in 2018 from the United States to Syria, a country embroiled in a nearly decade-long civil war that had by then become the twenty-first century's bloodiest conflict.

There, he joined up with volunteers from around the world in the international units of the YPG, the Kurdish militia leading the fight against ISIS. He and the other members of YPG International spent months training and waiting for action before participating in the final campaign against ISIS forces in Deir ez-Zor, fighting through Hajin and Ash Sha'fah, where Stoddard was ultimately wounded in action.

Stoddard's story, told here through interlaced works of short fiction, memoir, and journal entries, paints an intimate portrait of the lives of the internationalists fighting in Northeastern Syria during the final days of the YPG's war against the Islamic State: what they left behind, what they hoped to achieve, and what they were willing to sacrifice for the freedom of a people and a land that were not their own.