Briton who fought Isis killed in Raqqa
UK - A British former IT worker who went to Syria to fight Islamic State has been killed in Raqqa a week after the militants’ de facto capital was liberated, his mother has said.
Jac Holmes, 24, from Bournemouth, was one of the longest-serving volunteers with Syria’s Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), having travelled to northern Syria three times since 2015, and he featured regularly in the international media. It is understood he died on Monday in an explosion as the sniper unit he commanded cleared mines to make way for freed civilians to leave the war-ravaged city. His mother, Angie Blannin, told the Guardian: “I’m completely heartbroken. I can’t believe he’s gone. I was on the phone to Jac only on Sunday and we talked about how he planned to come home for Christmas now Raqqa is liberated. “Jac was the longest-standing foreign volunteer in the YPG as far as I know and, as a mother, you get used to pushing your fears to the back of your mind. But the longer he was out there the less I worried. Everyone who knew him said he was good at what he did. His Kurdish is fluent. I think he had a lot of guys had a lot of respect for him the Kurds, the westerners, everyone.” Holmes, who had no previous military experience, left his IT job in Bournemouth to join the YPG in Syria in January 2015. In May that year he said that he had been shot in the arm as his unit attempted to take control of a village from IS. After six months of fighting, he returned home for six weeks before heading back to Syria in August 2015. He was later imprisoned in Irbil, northern Iraq, on his way home from the front line. He then returned a final time in August last year where he experienced some of the heaviest fighting of the war with Isis, regularly posting about his experiences on Facebook.
(Theguardian.com)