This is the Popular Front podcast with me Jake Hanrahan.

We're focused on the niche details of modern warfare and underreported conflict all across the world.

Popular Front is completely independent.

Today we are speaking to Azad.

He is a foreign volunteer currently fighting out in Myanmar as part of a group of Westerners who went out there to assist in the rebels battle against the military junta.

They're not mercenaries. They do this because of ideological reasons and they do it for free. They're not getting paid or anything like that.

Whilst out there, they've also created some interesting new alliances

and introduced different ways of thinking to some of the rebels.

For more Popular Front, go to patreon.com slash popular front.

What exactly is the AIF?

I know we've seen foreign volunteers in Rajava in Ukraine, but seeing foreign volunteers pop up in Myanmar, for me at least, was kind of a shock. I don't know why I didn't think it would

happen like that, but there seems to be more and more. AIF is part of that. Can you explain

what you are and how it all started? Sure. So, AIF is the anti-fascist internationalist front.

It is, uh, at present the only, uh, how can we say like official body of foreign

volunteers, foreign revolutionaries participating in the Myanmar revolution.

AIF kind of came about as a result of, um, no, even before AIF was founded in October of last

year, there had been for some time already, even before the coup, always foreigners coming

in and out of Myanmar, no, whether for humanitarian purposes or whether to assist like

with the various rebel groups fighting against the central Burmese government.

However, after the coup, that started to shift, you know, there's always been kind of,

we can say like ex-military types or humanitarian types, but after the coup, there started

more people coming from an explicitly political and especially an explicitly

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