I first met Karim Franceschi in November 2016, in the hills of northeastern

, at a remote compound everyone called the Academy. It was a former oil facility that had been turned into a training camp for the volunteers from the U.S. and Europe who were coming to battle the Islamic State with the Kurds. A lot of the fighters were soldier-of-fortune types, veterans of the French Foreign Legion or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but at least half were militant leftists like Franceschi, an avowed communist who wore a Mao pin on the lapel of his camouflage uniform. He had been one of the first to arrive, in October 2014, and by the time we met, he had seen more combat than any other Westerner around.





After receiving permission

to form the platoon, Franceschi spent five months recruiting members and training them in tactics he found in military field manuals. In April 2017, they took part in their first combat operation: the battle to seize Tabqa Dam, a giant hydroelectric facility that supplies Raqqa with water and power.











