The Foreign Fighters of Rojava

The facility is more of a clinic than a hospital, its rooms filled with young men wounded in battle. Doctors here say pain medication is in short supply, and that Jansen only receives a new dose when the pain appears too much to bear. He doesn't speak Arabic or Kurdish, and struggles to communicate with the small medical team that attend to him.

Jansen, a Dutch citizen, left behind his European life - including his three young children - last November in order to join the YPG, becoming a foreign volunteer fighter with the Syrian Kurdish militia that is battling the Islamic State (IS) militant group in both Iraq and Syria.

The YPG regards Syria's al-Hasakah province as part of West Kurdistan, termed Rojava, by the Kurdish population. The IS, which boasts of its own prowess at gathering foreign fighters to join its ranks, surrounds this small province, pushing to advance on the Kurdish Rojava region.

Jansen had been serving back and forth in both Iraq and Syria before he was injured. He'd just started a new tour of duty near Sinjar, Iraq, when an Islamic State IED (roadside bomb) hit the YPG convoy he was travelling in. Immediately, he was rushed back across the now fluid Iraq-Syria border with two large pieces of shrapnel lodged in his skull, just touching his brain. When Jansen finally arrived at the simple facility in al-Hasakah, doctors immediately rushed to his aid, removing the large metal chunks.

Today, Jansen's head is crudely wrapped in bandages, his face covered in dark blast wounds. He is mostly immobile, apart from being able to lift an arm to show off a tattoo scrawled in neat black Arabic that reads - albeit backwards - 'I have a date with death, make up or take me.'

While conscious, Jansen remains confused as to what happened after the IED hit. At first doctors were unsure he would survive.

"When he came in he was in shock and went right into surgery," says Dr Abat Abu Mohammad. "We took the shrapnel out of his head, two pieces of the shrapnel were very large pieces - we were just hoping for our comrade to live."

Doctor Mohammed and his medical staff refer to him as the 'American' in Arabic, a hint to the language barrier in the hospital, which was part of the reason Jansen's family were not notified of his injuries until contacted by the Sunday Herald, at the request of bed-ridden Jansen, over a week after the incident.

Jansen however, is just one of around two dozen foreign fighters that have flocked to Syria's al-Hasakah province to join the YPG in the battle against the IS jihadists.

In Ras al-Ayn, a strategic YPG stronghold on the northern Syrian border, news of Jansen's injuries came as a shock to the three Americans and two Germans currently based there. Out of the five foreign fighters, all of whom have previous military service, only one has seen active frontline service with the YPG - the others instead carry out internal security tasks, manning road checkpoints and guarding VIP visitors, a role these fighters say, they did not expect when first making the illegal trek into war-torn Syria.

According to the Defence Minister of Rojava, Abdul Karim Sarukhan, these western fighters are just a few of the foreign fighters who have joined the YPG in the fight against IS. However, unlike Jansen, most are not on the frontlines, like their western IS foreign fighter counterparts.

"We don't want anything to happen to them [the foreign fighters]," insists Sarukhan, explaining why many of the YPG foreign fighters are not actively fighting against the IS. "We don't want them to be shot or killed. We [YPG] respect that they came here to fight, but we are trying now to protect them until they know this area well and are ready to fight, after this they can go to fight."

While Sarukhan is aware that many of the foreign recruits come to the YPG with previous military experience, he doesn't believe that makes them ready for the front.

"Our war here is so different from what these guys have seen in Afghanistan and so on. The style of war is different, the geography is different and the IS is a different kind of enemy," he explains.

Richard Jones, an American ex-soldier who came to Syria a little over a month ago, is frustrated with the YPG's attitude towards foreign fighters like himself. Jones came to Syria after reading countless reports and articles about the treatment of IS captives, particularly young women some of whom have been forced to become IS slaves to be sold, beaten and raped by their captors. Jones said these accounts specifically were the tipping point that pushed him to book a flight to the Middle East.

"I knew I couldn't just stand by and do nothing, so that's when I chose to come here," he says, standing outside in the Syrian winter cold. "I didn't know if I'd be successful here, but I knew I'd hate myself for not trying."

Jones came to Syria with the intention of battling IS, his motives more driven by this than any notion of standing in solidarity with the Kurdish struggle. More than anything, he says, he desperately wants to kill an IS militant. Instead, Jones has been put on guard duty.

When the YPG gathers a convoy to take the Sunday Herald on a tour of the area surrounding the barracks, Jones is hopeful he will get a chance to go to the frontline. When the convoy stops at a Syria-Turkish border area for a basic patrol, he is visibly disappointed. When the next stop is a small village where the IS blew a few buildings to rubble during their siege of the area, Jones and a fellow foreign fighter, Hans Schneider from Germany, express fears of being used as public relations tools for the YPG, rather than as trained soldiers.

Although some of the foreign fighters who have made their way to Syria in the hope of battling IS militants have been left feeling under used in a ground war where the number of individual fighters still remains important, there is one militia group fighting alongside the YPG that has a foreign fighter, a Swiss national, now turned-guerrilla fighter, who commands 700 Kalashnikov-carrying men.

Driving southeast of Ras al-Ayn, through al-Hasakah province towards the IS controlled areas of Tell Hamis, roads are interrupted by mounds of dirt and mud that turn into dug out trenches, stretching off into the horizon. The road is lined with abandoned villages, bullet-sprayed buildings with the slogans IS fighters scribbled hurriedly out in Arabic.

At the end of the road a bombed-out church comes into view. Beside it sits a small house, a makeshift barracks of the Syriac Military Council (MFS), an Assyrian Christian militia group based in northern Syria.

Two-dozen guerrilla fighters, as well as Johan Coser the founder of the armed group, guard the barracks on this frontline outpost.

Coser is a Swiss citizen and former high ranking officer in country's army. He initially arrived in Syria as a journalist, but with Assyrian Christian roots from the region, quickly found himself with a gun in hand training young Assyrian Christians how to fight on Syria's battlefields.

While some of the foreign fighters who have picked up arms in Syria are concerned about the actions their own governments may take against them when the time comes to return home, Coser says he has done nothing wrong, and therefore is not afraid of reprimand.

"I am not a terrorist here. I am not fighting with the IS, I am fighting against IS," says Coser emphatically.

Flanked by an intricate tapestry of the biblical scene The Last Supper and a rack of Kalashnikovs that hang from rusted pins on a wall in the small dilapidated barracks, Coser tells of his leap from the suburbs of St. Gallen a town in north eastern Switzerland, to civil-war torn Syria.

"I can say that my taking command of the MFS is all about my experience from the Swiss Army," Coser says. "My experience is the modern art of war, it's not old like here in the Middle East," he says insisting that the MFS with improved training are moving a "step forward."

With just 700 fighters the MFS is a small player in the Syrian civil war, but one that has fought IS in both Syria and Iraq for almost three years.

As we talk, Coser tries to point out IS positions a few kilometres away, but the terrain is covered in ribbons of mist and fog that obscure our view. He points in the general direction of where the militants lie in wait, wary himself of the accuracy of IS snipers in the area. He says that IS fighters prefer to advance during the night, or under a blanket of fog, giving them protection from the US-led airstrikes above.

Despite its modest numbers, Coser's miniature militia force fighting alongside the Kurdish YPG has successfully helped push back IS and other fighters from jihadist groups like the al-Nusra Front from parts of al-Hasakah province.

Coser talks with confidence about the future of the area, saying he feels comfortable and no longer alien there.

Most importantly he does not believe the fight ends simply with the defeat of IS.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his regime refuses to recognise the rights of Assyrian Christians in Syria he insists, and so Assad too must also fall before Coser feels he can eventually return home.

"I think for me now it is something normal to fight for the Syrian people," Coser says.

"The one thing I learned during my time the Swiss Army was that you must always carry your weapon every time you or your comrades are in a dangerous situation. Now, the situation is not only about me or my comrades, it is about all humanity, about democracy, it's about people. That's why my presence here in Syria is accepted one hundred percent."