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Frankly, that seems to be the problem.

Welcome to Angry Planet.

Hello and

and I'm Matthew Galt. Jason Fields is on the road today.

With America's retreat from Afghanistan still fresh, it's popular for politicians and pundits to bemoan America's inability to fight and win a war.

But that line ignores an important bit of recent history we seem to have memory hold the war against the Islamic State.

America didn't fight this war alone, however, far from it, an international coalition of trained

soldiers and volunteer troops recognized a horrifying threat and came together to defeat it.

And as terrifying as the Islamic State is and was, the successful campaign against it simply isn't talked

about that much anymore. but today we're going to

resurrect that memory. With me here to talk about the war is someone who fought in

it till Baz Pasha. Along with his fellow soldiers John Fox and Sean Murray, Boz is the author of the book

America's War in Syria fighting with Kurdish anti-IS forces. Sir, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and talking about the book and your experiences.

Thanks for having me. All right, so we'd like to start off with the basics. Can you just, can you give me a little bit about your background, like where you come from and what your interest was in the

the conflict in Syria?

Yeah, I mean that's quite a complex question already, which I kind of try to talk, address in the book a little bit, but a German academic, I, yeah, I did my PhD in the UK on in political geop, like political geography looking at security. I worked on various forms of security as an academic for about 10 years after that and I ended up as a lecturer in Surin at Surin University in

Kurdistan and the Iraqi part of Kurdistan and started doing research in Rojava Syria, the Kurdish areas, and then got sucked into the conflict, really,

to a point where I couldn't really get out of it. I felt I had the moral obligation to stay and do something

because it's, you know, being a German leftist, genocide, the Holocaust plays a very important role in my political upbringing.

And you know, suddenly there was this point in Syria where Zedes, you know, would describe

...