A former U.S. Army serviceman who’s turned recruiter for foreigners eager to fight with Kurdish forces against ISIS has warned that a British actor who’s shown up in Syria is a liability who is in danger of being killed by his own comrades.
Jordan Matson made the claim in a post on Facebook.
Since arriving in Rojava, a Kurdish enclave in northern Syria, Enright, who plays minor roles in Hollywood, has made headlines with a series of interviews and social media posts. The 51-year-old, who has no military training, talks about his desire to kill ISIS while fighting with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG.
CNN has reached out to Enright for comment.
In his post Thursday, Matson, from the town of Sturtevant, Wisconsin, calls for whoever “is in charge of monitoring my account for the (U.S.) State Department” to send someone to retrieve Enright before it’s too late.
The actor, he said, “is in danger of being killed by one of many westerners and Kurds who want to bury him.”
Immediately after arriving, Enright — who played parts in “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” “Old Dogs” and “Knight and Day” — tried to sell his story to the media, Matson said.
He’s since been kicked out of four fighting units and has been asked to leave twice by the YPG, he said.
Matson said that generals have said they try to keep the actor isolated from their men for his own safety.
The bolt has been taken out of Enright’s AK-47 rifle, disabling it, “so he runs around taking pictures of himself in the rear saying he killed daesh with a weapon he cant (sic) fire,” Matson wrote. Daesh is another name for ISIS widely used by European and Arab allies and is despised by the terrorist group.
Matson named other Westerners he said could confirm his account.
He added that Enright “is still working on his movie script.”
Matson told CNN his Facebook post was directed at the U.S. government — from whom he hasn’t had a response — but that he’d since been told that it would be up to the UK authorities to act since Enright is a UK citizen.
Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria have been among the most effective counterbalances to ISIS’ expansion. In Syria, the YPG’s high-profile battle to keep the town of Kobani from ISIS control dominated news coverage last year.
Recruitment drives
On what appears to be his own Facebook page, Enright is described as “a former actor and athlete. Upon seeing the outrages of the terrorist group ISIS, he moved to the Middle East to personally join the battle.”
Enright has also posted links to coverage of his “mission” by The Huffington Post, Time magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, ABC News and Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper.
While it is difficult to say how many foreign volunteers are fighting ISIS, a spokesman for the YPG told The New York Times in March that their forces include more than 100 American citizens.
U.S. law enforcement officials say it is illegal to join a Syrian militia.
But some organizations have set up recruitment drives online, featuring applications for foreign fighters complete with checklists of what to bring and advice on bringing body armor across international borders.
Matson told CNN in October — when he’d been with the YPG for a month — that he’d realized after much soul searching he needed to help in the battle against ISIS’ brutal, expansionist regime.
During his two years in the Army, Matson never once saw combat or deployment overseas. But it took little time before he was engaged in battles with ISIS fighters in Syria.