Former British soldier went to Syria to fight ISIS – but was arrested for terrorism on his return

The blasts as three Islamic State car bombs hit a town in northern Syria were so catastrophic, he heard them from 10 miles away.

Former British soldier Jim Matthews raced to Tal Tamir to help in the rescue effort and saw a woman’s legs poking out of the rubble of a smashed building.

They were moving slightly as she clung on to her last moments of life but he was unable to reach her. Now back in England, it is an image that still haunts Jim.

He chose to go to the war-ravaged country to fight IS but on his return a year later, he became the first person prosecuted for fighting with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).

The UK does not class the YPG as a terror group and we and the US are backing its forces to drive IS from Syria. He had plotted his route back by ferry from France, anticipating his arrest and thinking it less conspicuous than flying into Heathrow. But he was arrested and charged with “attending a place used for terrorist training”.

After more than two years, the case was dropped when the CPS offered no evidence against him. Now, six months on, the 44-year-old is only just starting to comprehend the things he saw and has written a memoir, Fighting Monsters, to share his remarkable story.

“That night in Tal Tamir does haunt me,” Jim says over a coffee in Central London.

“She was still alive and there was nothing I could do to help her, everything around her was just too big and heavy to be moved by human hands.

“I had to make the decision to help who I could and get people out who I could, it was about prioritising in the moment – but I still had to walk back and forward, passing her moving legs, knowing she was still alive.

“The worst thing I have taken away from the experience is this constant hyper-vigilance. If I can hear something and I don’t know what it is, I get very alert and on edge.

“I hoped it would have gone away by now… I don’t know whether it will ever go away.”

In 2015, Jim left his job teaching English at a military camp in Saudi Arabia to go to Iraq and meet the YPG.

Rojava is a self-declared autonomous region of northern Syria controlled by the YPG. The YPG will not say how many foreigners have joined but it is thought to be thousands.

The YPG was formed in 2004 as the armed wing of the Kurdish leftist Democratic Union Party. Turkey has criticised it for alleged support for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, designated a terrorist group by Turkey and Western regimes.

Jim still struggles to explain what motivated him to get on that flight, knowing the group would smuggle him into Syria, where IS was kidnapping and beheading Brits for propaganda videos.

In fact, he admits to thinking just months before: “I’d heard about Western volunteers getting directly involved in the fighting.

“There was no way I’d do it, though. I’d been a soldier once but that was a decade and a half earlier.”

He says the four years he spent in the Royal Pioneer Corps were “wasted years”, spurring him on to campaign against conflict as a “left-leaning anti-war protester”.

So why on earth would he ever want to go to war and put himself directly in the line of fire?

Jim, originally of Stoke-on-Trent, hesitates. But in his book, he writes: “Perhaps it was because this was a chance to actually fight, for once. Not to protest, campaign or negotiate. Maybe some not-grown-up part of me still regretted never using all that training for real.”

He was motivated to contact the YPG in 2014, when he saw a photo of a jihadi holding a woman’s severed head on Facebook . But he admits that there is a huge leap from being repulsed by IS and helping to fight them.

Source: Mirror