Six hundred meters away, on the other side of the road, a white-circle-on-black-background Islamic State flag was clearly visible in the Sunni Muslim village of Wahda; there are regular clashes here, and raids by both sides. Over a spartan breakfast—the silence broken by some of the fighters grumbling that the Peshmerga in the other half of the camp have fresh chickens delivered on a daily basis—Kalar explained what he took to be the real difference between his men and the Peshmerga. “Peshmerga have families. They go home to see them and come back. But we in the P.K.K. don’t have families. We are training and thinking of new tactics every day.”

All the same, they seemed perilously ill-equipped. Walking around the base I admired a brand new Toyota pickup truck and one of the fighters chuckled, claiming that they’d recently stolen it from the Islamic State. Kalar claimed that the P.K.K. hadn’t been given any heavy weapons by the international coalition; a condition of the delivery of those weapons to the Peshmerga, he claimed, was that they mustn’t find their way into the hands of the P.K.K. “They [the Islamic State] have tanks, they have everything,” the commander told me. “They took it from the Iraqi Army.” Just as it’s doing in Sinjar, the P.K.K. around Kirkuk is busy training local villagers to form their own guerrilla bands and protect themselves against the Islamic State. It was clear, though, that the P.K.K.’s real effort lay elsewhere: Kalar had had only one fighter killed in the fighting around Kirkuk, but the P.K.K. had lost 120 in the fighting around Sinjar.

A few of the local villagers joined us for tea, and the conversation turned to the fighting abilities of Daesh. “They don’t want to surrender,” said Kalar. “They bomb their bodies,” he said, referring to the Islamic State’s habit of using their own men as stealth suicide bombers. “They don’t obey the rules of war, so we can’t capture them.” Instead, he said, he and his forces try to shoot Daesh fighters from fifteen to twenty meters away, so as to minimize the risk of suicide bombs. Would he ever send any of his men on a suicide mission himself? His men were not afraid of death, Kalar replied, but he could not countenance sending anyone out on such a mission: “We protect life.” When I asked him why so few P.K.K. appear to have been captured alive by the Islamic State for their gory execution videos, however, he became more circumspect: “We have ways and strategies to prevent that.” It was not clear what he meant, other than that P.K.K. fighters will fight to the death.

In any case, Daesh aren’t the only ones with a reserve army of volunteers to draw upon. Those who are fighting against them are making international friends too. On our journey into Sinjar city we stopped off at a makeshift hospital, with sleeping dogs and bags of potatoes in the corridor, and I was ushered into a roomful of patients. One of them was an amiable 37-year-old U.S. army veteran who told me his name was Patrick. I asked him why he’d come to fight, and he pulled something straight from the playbook of American evangelical Christianity. “I have selfish reasons”, he said. “Back home I found no purpose or meaning in life, so I prayed. America is different, you know; it’s just money. So I prayed for a purpose and meaning in my life. Here I find myself—I don’t know how else to explain it—finding purpose and meaning in helping these people to overcome Daesh.” He had arrived in Iraq two weeks earlier, on January 3, he said; his comrade, another American army veteran who had arrived a month earlier, was lying beside him on a stretcher alongside an Australian. While Patrick was unhurt, both the Australian and the other American had been lightly wounded by a mortar that, according to the Australian, “landed in our faces.” Both the Americans had taken local names, derived from the names of Kurdish mountains. “The Kurds are a mountain people”, Patrick explained. His nom de guerre was Guevara, while his comrade had chosen Judy. “Judy’s a girl’s name,” I said. “Not around here,” said Judy.