While there has been plenty of coverage on foreigners leaving their home countries to join ISIS, somewhat less talked about has been those who have traveled to the region to join the fight against ISIS — some for religious reasons, some for reasons of simple justice, and some probably for their own reasons:

Saint Michael, the archangel of battle, is tattooed across the back of a U.S. army veteran who recently returned to Iraq and joined a Christian militia fighting Islamic State in what he sees as a biblical war between good and evil.

Brett, 28, carries the same thumb-worn pocket Bible he did whilst deployed to Iraq in 2006 – a picture of the Virgin Mary tucked inside its pages and his favourite verses highlighted.

“It’s very different,” he said, asked how the experiences compared. “Here I’m fighting for a people and for a faith, and the enemy is much bigger and more brutal.”

Further:

Matthew VanDyke says he is “stepping in where the international community failed.”

In a post on Twitter Thursday, the American said he has spent the last two months “helping to raise a Christian army” in Iraq to fight the Islamic State group.

“The international community does very little for Christians in the Middle East, so if they’re not going to do it, we’ll do it.”

FoxNews even led with a headline of “Onward Christian Soldiers” for a time.

The situation is probably not too unlike Americans traveling to Israel to join the IDF, something probably far more common than many realize.

To be clear, these militias do not claim to be fighting a war to impose a religious faith or to demonstrate the superiority of their beliefs — unlike ISIS’s “convert or die.”  They are a “Christian” militia only insomuch as they are alike in faith and attempting to defend their group from targeted annihilation — in a region where militias also identify as Sunni, Shia, by leader, and other ideologies.

Interesting.

Also at the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post, the Stars and Stripes, the Christian Post, and Clarion-Ledger.

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