Macer Gifford answered the call in 2015. At the time he was a wealthy Tory who worked in finance. Macer gave it all up — the money, the security, the safety of the UK — to take up arms in the Middle East.

“I grew up in Cambridgeshire, I went to university and studied politics and international relations at Loughborough,” he explains.“I loved the activism of politics. I was a member of the Conservative Party. I quickly got bored of that and almost fell into the finance industry.”

Macer was 27-years-old when ISIS began taking control of large swaths of land in Syria and Iraq. He was disgusted by what he saw as a lack of response from the West, whose involvement was limited to airstrikes and the deployment of special forces. He felt something radical needed to be done.

“I was just completely shocked and appalled at the sudden growth... the barbarity of the organisation [ISIS] and everything they were doing out in Syria. Even more so by the lack of a reaction from the British government and the Americans."

Around this time the Kurds were starting to appeal for international volunteers to fight alongside them. Macer made contact through a group, called Lions of Rojava, that was recruiting on Facebook, and left to join the fight. He was going steady, in a relationship, looking to buy a house.

“Some volunteers go because they just want to fight ISIS. They don't really care about the democratic revolution that's going on on the ground. All they heard was ‘You can go over and fight ISIS? Fuck ISIS, I hate ISIS I'm going to go and fight ISIS.”

“Whereas others are much more politically driven and they want to go out, fearful of fighting ISIS, feeling like they have to do it because this is actually a genuinely progressive revolution right in the Middle East that they feel they can relate to, and want to nurture and support and even fight for.

The “democratic revolution” Macer mentions is a political system fathered by Abdullah Öcalan known as apoism, or democratic confederalism. Its etymology comes from his affectionate Kurdish moniker – apo – meaning ‘uncle’ in English.

Based on the Communalist philosophies of Murray Bookchin, Öcalan’s theory of democratic confederalism teaches autonomous libertarian anarchism with a left-wing approach. Ecology, female rights and unity are the basis for revolution. Its primary tenet is a political administration that functions without a nation state.

Kurds that support the PKK view Öcalan as their ideological leader. He is a founding member of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party, otherwise known as the PKK. The PKK is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK and US because of its role fighting an insurgency against Turkey. The group took up arms in aid of creating an independent Kurdish state, but have since limited their demands to equal rights and Kurdish autonomy in Turkey.

With the help of the CIA, a Turkish intelligence agency arrested Öcalan in 1999 and sentenced him to death. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment after Turkey abolished the death penalty, as part of its bid to join the European Union. For the last 19 years he has been held in solitary confinement on the prison island of İmralı, a Turkish equivalent to Alcatraz, in the Sea of Marmara.

“I've always been on the left of the Conservative party,” Macer says. “I don't know how to define myself exactly but, my grandfather was a trade unionist. I'm a supporter of the trade unionist movement and I want to abolish the House of Lords, I want to nationalise the railways.”

He went to Syria three times and fought in the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa for six months until it was liberated by a coalition of YPG and other militia forces. Macer said it was the “symbolic end of ISIS” and that the extremists “were completely imploding until the Turkish invasion of Afrin - that helped rejuvenate them.”

Afrin used to be a Kurdish city in Northern Syria. In January 2018, Turkish forces invaded under the pretence of attacking the Islamic State, despite the jihadist group having no tangible presence in the region or even nearby. On March 18, after some intense battles, the YPG withdrew and the city centre was under Turkish control. Turkey has been accused of war crimes that include using chemical weapons, indiscriminately shelling civilians and shooting them as they flee the fighting.

On March 30 a suspected jihadist killed an SAS sniper and an American special forces soldier, who were part of an operation to “kill or capture a known ISIS member,” after detonating an improvised explosive device in the nearby town of Manbij. Since the invasion there has been a flood of video evidence showing the Turkish backed fighters looting civilian houses in Afrin.

Before Raqqa, though, Macer was stationed on the frontline outside Kobane, a city with symbolic importance in Northern Syria after Kurdish forces liberated it (with the help of Western airstrikes) from ISIS control: “It wasn't much of a frontline. ISIS were like two miles away, I couldn't even see them. There were no mortars, there's no bullets whistling overhead or anything like that. It was just a case of weeks and weeks of boredom, of hanging around.”