TORONTO – Ten days after volunteering to fight ISIS in Syria, he was on the front lines, a six-year veteran of the Canadian Forces wrote in a blog post Monday.
Brandon Glossop, a 26-year-old from Sidney, British Columbia joined the fight against ISIS in February, he said, and quickly found himself in the midst of the war.
“In that time we bounced back and forth between 6 different camps and bases, were issued a rifle, 5 magazines, a pineapple grenade, cigarettes, and a Kurdish war name (I was given the name “Zinar”),” Glossop wrote in a lengthy blog post published Monday.
Glossop, who said he volunteered with the People’s Protection Units (YPG) – a Kurdish force fighting ISIS – detailed liberating several villages along with YPG forces, many of whom are teenagers, and the female YPJ units, commanded by a woman in her mid-thirties “with a master’s degree in genetic biology that spoke four languages.”
“About 100 YPG and YPJ soldiers sat around the sides of the road smoking cigarettes and chewing sunflower seeds. It was a straight shot to the city that stood 2 km away and was blossoming in mushroom clouds, each one proceeded by the heavy thud of a coalition airstrike,” he wrote.
Glossop joined the Canadian Forces in 2007 and completed a tour of duty in Afghanistan in 2009 before finding work in Fort McMurray, Alberta. He joined the fight against ISIS in February after becoming incensed that it was targeting Canada, according to a report in The Province soon after he joined.
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Glossop said YPG and YPJ forces liberated seven villages over the next week and encountered little resistance. In some villages, he wrote, they only found “bodies and ISIS propaganda still taped to the walls.”
Brandon goes on to say that he, and another man identified as British veteran Daniel Meally, requested to be pushed “forward to where the action was.” Two days later, he wrote, he came under heavy machine gun fire from over a kilometre away. He was with Meally and a handful of Kurdish fighters who offered the sniper rifle and machine gun to the two westerners.
“Rounds peppered the berm below us and sliced the air above us, but all the Kurds seemed concerned about was that my first firefight with them was as satisfying as possible. Flattered, I took the 7.62 Dragnov with a half decent scope, and Dan, being an ex machine gunner took the PKC,” he wrote.
Global News has been unable to verify Glossop’s account.
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Meally posted on a Facebook fan page for Glossop saying they were the only two westerners in the group.
“And yes we are winning hard,” he wrote.
But his first blog post does provide a glimpse into the mentally exhausting side of war for Kurdish rebels. He described three men going into uncontrollable, epileptic-like fits, with six others being forced to hold a man down in one instance. His comrades said it was “the war sickness” – or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
“Dan and I have both witnessed the symptoms of PTSD in fellow veterans, but never in such violent, isolated fits, but where our soldiers typically deploy for 6 or 7 months at a time, these men have been at war for years, and without the mental and physical healthcare provided by our modern militaries,” Glossop wrote.
“When you put a man under the kind of pressure only a war can apply and keep him under it and ignore the cracks and ruptures that form, eventually he will break.”
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