Starvin Larry

“A lot of people come over here thinking they’re going to be Rambo. It’s not like that.”

The village had no name. Everyone who had known the name of the village was now dead or had fled. When the Kurdish peshmerga fighters had recaptured the settlement from ISIS that spring, it was so full of booby-traps that they just torched the place rather than deal with it. The town was abandoned now—just somewhere for the men to come scavenge.

“This one’s my house,” Christopher Smith grinned. The former Marine corporal gestured with his battered AK-47 toward a fire-gutted jungle-green villa. All the buildings were like that—vibrant non-sequiturs of blue, yellow, purple. “It’s like Super Mario World,” the 25-year-old remarked.

While thousands of Europeans and North Americans have joined ISIS, at least a hundred Westerners have enlisted as fighters against the terrorist group. Compelled by reports of the Islamic State’s gruesome…