In a quiet corner of a family pub behind Blackburn Rovers’ Ewood Park football stadium, Joe Robinson looks down at his pint. For the past two months, he explains, he has felt on edge and unable to sleep for more than two or three hours a night.

The 22-year-old former British soldier returned two months ago from Syria, where he had fought as a civilian alongside Kurdish forces against Islamic State militants during one of the civil war’s bloodiest periods. Since returning to Blackburn – penniless, jobless and homeless – he has found adapting to civilian life a struggle.

“When you go [to a war zone] with the military you’re getting paid, you’re getting lots of support, you have decompression and stuff like that,” he said. “When I came back, I’d spent every penny I had to get over there, I left my job to get over there. I’ve had nowhere to live. I’ve come back with nothing, no support and nobody to talk to.”

Robinson poses beside damaged tanks. Photograph: Facebook

Last week Robinson contacted Combat Stress, the veterans’ mental health charity, on the advice of his mother and fiancee. He has now found a sales job to tide him over, and is sleeping at a friend’s house until he finds his own place. Things are starting to look up.

He is, however, not allowed to leave the country. Robinson returned to the UK on 28 November, needing “a break” after five months of fighting with little armour, antique AK47s and sub-standard tactics. On arrival at Manchester airport he was arrested by counter-terrorism police, had his passport seized and was questioned for 10 hours, he said. He remains on police bail until March.

Robinson in Makhmour, Iraqi Kurdistan. Photograph: Facebook

It was the day after the Tunisian beach terrorist attack in June last year that Robinson quit his job to go to fight in Syria, telling his boss only that he was going abroad. Over the previous 12 months, starting with the murder of Salford aid worker Alan Henning, he had grown increasingly incensed by both Islamic State’s gory propaganda videos and what he saw as Britain’s inaction in Syria.

“Our government were doing nothing about it. That’s the reason I went,” he said. “Everyone knows what’s happened – our government were doing nothing about it – I thought, if our government’s not going to do anything about it then I will. I’ve got the training, so why not use it to help people.”

His life in Blackburn had already been turbulent. He got into a fight on a night out and punched a man, breaking his jaw in two places. He was caught after apologising to his victim on Facebook and was sentenced to community service. But before completing his sentence (he has nearly finished it now, he adds) he went off to Syria.



He told his mother he was going to France to try join the French foreign legion – he had tried unsuccessfully after leaving the British army two years ago – and started researching ways to enter Syria.



Robinson used Facebook to contact Jordan Matson, a former US soldier and one of the most prominent westerners fighting against Isis. Matson put him in touch with the Lions of Rojava, a Kurdish unit hosting a number of foreign militants, including Britons.

Robinson (right) with other foreign fighters in Tal Abyad, Syria. Photograph: Facebook

Days later, he flew from Manchester to Germany, where he booked a separate flight to Sulaymaniyah, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. On arrival, he rang a middleman, then passed his phone to a taxi driver waiting outside the airport terminal, who drove him to a safe house.

“I had to get in the car, didn’t have a clue where I was going – for all I know I’m going to end up in a fucking orange jumpsuit and get my head cut off,” he says.

When he reached the safe house, a motel about 20 minutes’ drive away, he was relieved to see four Americans. At this point, he told his mother where he was and what he planned to do.

“She was heartbroken. You can imagine, can’t you,” he said, looking down again, ashamed.

The next day Robinson and the Americans travelled with the Kurdish militia group YPG, or People’s Protection Units, to the Iraqi mountains bordering Turkey and Syria before sneaking over the border. There, he said, he crossed paths with westerners who had suffered devastating injuries from improvised explosive devices (IEDs), but it was not until his first week on the ground in Syria that he witnessed the full scale of the war.

Robinson was one of the YPG fighters who fought in the battle of Sarrin, capturing the key northern town fromIsis militants who had been using it as a launchpad for attacks on Kobani.



Robinson said his group captured a school in the centre of Sarrin that had been turned by Isis militants into a sharia court and used to hold sex slaves.

“For the first three days we were there, they sent a wave of 23 suicide bombers at us,” he said. “We were trying to fend them off and they were blowing up in pieces. It was pretty ruthless. When they realised they couldn’t attack us with suicide bombers, they started attacking civilians to draw us out – that’s when the civilian casualties came to the gate.”

Robinson with children in Kobani, Syria. Photograph: Facebook

The image of one particular group of casualties is seared in Robinson’s memory. A father and his young son and daughter had been brought to the gate of the school with horrific injuries. The father, he said, had stood on an IED while they were fleeing the town, losing his right leg. His son was missing both arms and his daughter had lost her right leg and right arm. Robinson treated them all. He doesn’t say whether they survived.

In his first newspaper interview since returning from Syria, it is clear Robinson has been deeply affected by what he witnessed. The former infantryman, who did a tour of Afghanistan in 2012, talks with emotional intensity about the plight of the Kurdish people – particularly those caught up in Turkey’s recent military crackdown in its Kurdish regions – of whom he admits he knew nothing about before going to Syria.



He said he believes Turkey should be kicked out of Nato and claims to have witnessed Turkish soldiers handing weapons and ammunition to Isis fighters in Jarabulus, just over the Turkish border, in August; a claim almost impossible to verify and one that would be denied by Turkey.

Since returning, he has been lauded as a hero in his Lancashire hometown of Accrington. “I don’t want the attention, I don’t like the attention. I want people to be aware of what’s going on,” he said. “A lot of people see you as this brave person, but I don’t see it as that. I don’t think I’m brave. I tell you what, mate, I was fucking terrified the entire way of going through with it.”



Now he wants to return to some kind of normality: “Going from that situation to being back in civilian life … hopefully everything’s starting to line up.”



Would he go back to Syria? “I’m not allowed to answer that,” he said with a smile.