Abstract

Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the foreign fighters’ phenomenon attracted the interest of the academic literature. Since 2014, tens of thousands of individuals from over 100 countries joined the Islamic State and several other jihadist militias in Syria. The existing scholarship has mainly focused on identifying the causes of mobilization of foreign fighters who enlisted for the Islamic State, while also investigating the implications of their participation in civil wars. The article, after systematizing the existing literature, contributes to the literature on foreign fighters by analyzing through semi-structured qualitative interviews a neglected sample, the foreign combatants that joined the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG/YPJ). The data shows that the foreign fighters for the Kurds were ideologically akin to the YPG/YPJ and had little previous military experience, contributing little to none to the warfare operations in the field