Armed with a humanitarian’s compassion and a revolutionary’s zeal, a young Salt Spring man finds himself at the heart of an emancipatory movement that stands to redraw politics in the Middle East.
Cody Bergerud arrived in Turkey in January, inspired by stories of the region’s Kurdish people and their struggle for freedom. The 26-year-old Gulf Islands Secondary School graduate ventured to the country’s southeast, where he worked in refugee camps, honed his language skills and made connections with like-minded people involved in the Kurdish cause. He eventually got a visa to travel into northern Iraq, then followed a smuggling route to reach Syria, where he settled in Til Temir, a city worlds away from his childhood home on Beaver Point Road.
Several hundred foreigners from Canada, the United States and Western Europe have travelled the same route. Many are volunteer fighters inspired to take up arms against ISIS by joining guerrilla militias like the peshmerga in northern Iraq or Syria’s Lions of Rojava. They sign up through social media groups, buy a plane ticket to the Middle East, receive military training and equipment, and get dispatched to the frontline.
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