Anti-Islamic State fighters from around the globe were among hundreds of mourners who flooded a small Dorset community hall on Friday to celebrate the life of a British former IT worker killed fighting the jihadist group in Syria.

Jac Holmes, 24, from Bournemouth, was one of the longest-serving international volunteers with Syria’s Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), having travelled to northern Syria three times since August 2015.

Holmes, whose exploits featured regularly in the international media, was killed on 23 October when an abandoned suicide belt exploded as the sniper unit he was commanding cleared mines in the newly liberated former Isis stronghold of Raqqa.

About 400 people, including family members, friends, British Kurds, the parents of other British men to have died in Syria and about 30 former YPG comrades from across the world packed the hall in Wimborne to pay tribute to their “fearless hero”.

Holmes’ coffin, covered in yellow and green flowers, the colours of the YPG, was carried into the hall and placed in a bed of roses to cheers and Kurdish chants of “sehid nemarin” or “martyrs never die”.

Holmes’ father, Peter (rear, blue suit) helps carry his son’s coffin into the hall. Photograph: Phil Yeomans/BNPS

“I came all this way because Jac was one of the original volunteers to join the YPG,” said Canadian Hanna Bohman, one of a handful of international female volunteers to have joined the YPJ, the all-female affiliate of the YPG. “It’s good seeing so many other fighters who I know. We may never all be together like this again. Honestly, I just had to come.”



Spaniard Arges Artiaga, who was part of the four-man sniper unit with which Holmes fought during his final months in Syria and witnessed the young Briton’s death, said: “Jac was my best friend in Syria. He was always laughing and taking the piss, as you say in English.

“Although he had no military training, there is no one I would rather have had by my side in a battle. You rarely meet people in life who you know will take a bullet for you, but Jac was that guy for me. He saved my life many times. It should have been him coming home, not me.”

YPG flags and huge banners bearing photographs of Holmes decked the stage as a procession of members of Britain’s Kurdish community spoke in his honour.

Among them was Nuri Mahmud, the general commander of the YPG, who spoke to the congregation from Syria via Skype. “It would not have been possible to stop the plague of Isis from sprouting throughout the world if it were not for people like Jac Holmes,” he said.

Macer Gifford, a 31-year-old former volunteer who has fought on and off with the YPG in Syria since 2015, said: “Jac was loved and respected by everyone who knew him. We fought Isis together, for democracy and progressive values in Syria. What was it that made Jac what he was? It was his unique humour, his cheeky laugh and his desire to fight Isis. He went to Syria as a normal guy and lived like a hero, and died like a hero.”

Holmes left his IT job in Bournemouth to join the YPG in January 2015. Upon arrival in Syria, he completed the YPG’s mandatory month-long training programme, in which new recruits learn basic Kurdish, weaponry and battlefield tactics and are given a crash course in the socialist and feminist ideology of the YPG. He was then assigned to an infantry division where he was given the nom-de-guerre Sores Amanos – “sores” meaning “revolution” - and sent into battle. Over the next three years he returned to Syria twice, spending more than a year there on his third trip.

In a phone conversation with the Guardian from his frontline post in January 2017, he described the Kurdish Rojava region of northern Syria as his second home. “Over the years I’ve observed and learned a lot from living amongst the Kurds and fighting with them. Not everyone has it in them to do what the Kurds are doing out here, but I know that I do and I am good at it. So, it’s hard for me to leave it behind and forget about the people and the situation here, knowing I can be helping.”

During his time with the YPG, Holmes rose to the rank of commander of the 223 YPG sniper unit, fighting alongside a Spaniard, an American and a German on some of the fiercest battlegrounds in the war against Isis, known locally as Daesh, including Tel Hamis, Manbij, Tabqa and Raqqa.

Artiaga recalls the morning a building he and Holmes were guarding was set alight. “I was sleeping downstairs while he kept look out on the roof,” he said. “Suddenly Jac woke me up saying he could smell smoke. Daesh had set fire to the building and were trying to smoke us out. We could hear them outside. We knew they had the front door covered so we had to shoot a hole in the back wall to escape over the buildings. If he hadn’t smelt that smoke, I wouldn’t be here now.”

As media interest in his exploits grew, Holmes used his profile to bring wider attention to the role Kurdish fighters were playing in the conflict.

Ojan Kojgiri, a 28-year-old British Kurd from London said: “It surprised us how many foreign volunteers travelled to Syria to fight Isis for us,” he said. “They didn’t have to go, but they did. And now we are burying them. Only this morning my mother told me that she could live with her sons dying in the name of Kurdistan because it has been our lives for as long as we know, but it is so hard to hear about the deaths of foreigners fighting in our name. We can never do enough to thank the people like Jac.”

Holmes is believed to have been the sixth British citizen killed in Syria since the first foreign volunteers joined the fight against Isis in the autumn of 2014. The seventh, and most recent, was Oliver Hall, also 24, who was killed in Raqqa in November while attempting to save a Syrian child from a booby-trapped house.