When Paco Arcadio, a 21-year- old history student, arrived back in his hometown of Madrid in July after six months travelling, he had more than the usual tales of the road to share.
Instead of spending his months away InterRailing or working in a bar in Dublin or London, as many young Spaniards do, he had been in Syria and Iraq, fighting the extremists of Islamic State (IS) in the ranks of an international brigade of communists and other volunteers.
Arcadio had joined the brigade with a fellow member of Communist Reconstruction, a small Spanish political organisation that told them about the possibility of signing up.
"What motivated us to go were our Marxist-Leninist ideals," Arcadio told The Irish Times in a telephone interview. Those ideals, he said, drove him to fight the "fascism" of IS, also known as Isis.
“We didn’t go there for money, we went there for a higher reason – because of our ideology, we went because of our principles. And if you go because of your principles and not for money, you’ll be much stronger.”
Paco Arcadio is not his real name, but a nom de guerre. He is particularly keen to maintain his anonymity since returning from his stint fighting IS, because, he says, the organisation has put a price of $150,000 (€136,000) on his head and that of his comrade-in-arms, Cipriano Martos (also an assumed name).
When Martos was arrested shortly after their return to Madrid, Arcadio turned himself in to his local police station. Both were released after being questioned and spending a night in prison, but their passports have been confiscated. More seriously, they face charges of membership of a terrorist organisation, because the authorities believe they were fighting alongside the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.
Unrepentant
Arcadio strenuously denies this, but he is unrepentant about his stint in the world’s most notorious war zone.
“I’m convinced that what I did was right, I’m proud of it,” he says. “Even if the judge gives me 10, 15 or 20 years in jail, I won’t care, because I’ll never turn my back on what I did – that is, go to Syria and help the Kurdish population.”
He says that after receiving rudimentary training from other foreign volunteers in Ras al-Ayn, in northeastern Syria, he and Martos were given freedom to move around as they pleased. He is reluctant to give details of the military action he was involved in and is quick to say that he did not register any “confirmed kills”.
Experiences documented
While Arcadio and Martos are the only Spanish anti-IS fighters whose experiences have been documented, volunteers from several other Western countries are known to be fighting on the same side in Syria and Iraq.
Arcadio says he was proud to fight alongside many of the Greeks, Germans, Turks, Libyans and others he met on the frontline. He draws parallels with his country's civil war of 1936-39, when thousands of young idealists travelled to Spain to defend the leftist republican government from the forces of Francisco Franco, who received military support from the Axis powers.
But not all his fellow volunteers were there for the same reasons as he was.
“In the case of the Americans and the English that I met, they were former military,” he says. “They weren’t revolutionaries and so, of course, I didn’t share their view of the war, because in the end they are just there to kill Muslims.”
Chris Kozak, a Syria analyst at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, says this chimes with his research into the phenomenon of Western volunteers who fight IS.
"They have different motivations," he told The Irish Times. "Some have an internationalist view of the world, something akin to the Spanish Civil War. But others just go out there because they've heard bad things about Islamic State."
As the Syrian conflict drags on, so the body count of Western anti-IS fighters has increased. A young Australian, Reece Harding, was killed in June. In March, a former Royal Marine, Konstandinos Erik Scurfield, became the first British volunteer to die.
Arcadio says he and his fellow fighters were all too aware dying in action was preferable to being taken captive. “We decided that they would never take us alive, so we always saved our last bullet or grenade for ourselves,” he says.
