Graeber on the Rojava revolution.

SkyNews interview with a young British ISIS fighter.

"On this episode, Kumars is joined by first-time guest host Deellan Kashani, our resident Kurdish expert who wrote her undergraduate thesis on radical political organization in the Kurdish-controlled autonomous region of Rojava in northern Syria. Our guest is Brace Belden (better known by his former Twitter handle, @PissPigGranddad), a florist who recently returned from fighting with the Kurdish YPG forces to defend Rojava against ISIS."

A NYMag piece on PissPigGranddad's six-month tour of duty with the YPG in Syria. This article includes quite a bit of overlap with the Rolling Stones article I have linked to before, but it's even better.

@PissPigGrandad was interviewed on the Chapo Trap House podcast shortly after this article came out: https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/episode-82-war-is-heck-feat-pisspiggranddad-21317

Even anarchists get homesick.

I'm guessing this is the Scenes From Rojava photo blog Guy talked about starting in the article: https://www.facebook.com/scenesfromrojava/

Here's an interview with a French fighter with the YPG in Syria. He contradicts himself twice (Amnesty is wrong about villages being razed by YPG... they are only razed for strategic reasons; we don't need imperialist help to defeat IS... NATO air strikes are key to our offensive), but that helps it sound less like a pure propaganda piece.

I've read interviews with a few other fighters, and this guy is definitely the most political (and optimistic). He's fighting in a communist unit, but I wonder how many of the Kurdish fighters overall hold communism to be such an important aspect of the struggle for Rojava.

This article reports that Öcalan, the founder of PKK, has moved towards anarchism while in prison (after reading Murray Bookchin, apparently)... but I'm still getting a pretty strong Marxist-Leninst cult vibe from their website (http://www.pkkonline.com/en/).

Here's a quote from a 2012 interview with members of the Kurdistan Anarchist Forum:

"We are aware that Ocalan’s ideas have changed since he has been in prison. But we are not very optimistic about these changes. Also these changes have not, at least for the time being, been reflected in practice or organisationally in the PKK and PJAK. It is certainly true that the PKK has got many followers among the Kurdish people and have a big impact on Kurdish mass movements. They also talk about federalism. But none of this makes them in any way Anarchist organisations, nor does it make them compatible with Anarchism. They are, in fact, as far as one can get from Anarchists and Anarchism because Ocalan, first has not given up his authority and dominance over the mass movement, and second, they are still advocating nationalism and patriotism."

Still, anyone who would defy Turkish borders in order to resist ISIS sounds okay to me.