The Kurds in Europe are taking up Arms Against Islamic State Group

Shaho Pirani says he's just a phone call away from leaving his quiet life in Denmark and joining Kurdish forces battling against Islamic State militants in Iraq.

The 30-year-old Kurd, who fled from Iran with his older brother in 1991, says he feels a moral duty to help the peshmerga, the armed forces of the Kurdish regional government, to fight the "psychopaths" of the Islamic State group.

"I feel so helpless here," Pirani told The Associated Press in an interview in his home in Koege, a tranquil Copenhagen suburb with neatly trimmed lawns and hedges. "I am ready to die for the Kurdish cause."

Shaho Pirani posing with an automantic weapon near the

village of Koya in Iraqi Kurdistan in June 2014. The Iranian

Kurd living in Denmark, was on a month-long training camp

While more than 2,000 Europeans are believed to have joined the Islamic State organization and other jihadist groups as foreign fighters, a smaller number has left Europe in recent months to fight against the Islamic militants, primarily with peshmerga forces in Iraq's Kurdish north, Kurdish diaspora leaders and security officials say.

Unlike with Islamic State fighters, however, European governments don't show any intention to stop the Kurdish volunteers from getting involved in the conflict. Though they, too, stand to get weapons training and combat experience and could return traumatized by the horrors of war, the Kurdish fighters are not seen as a threat to the West.

"Our focus as a security service will be more on groups like IS and not people going to defend areas against the IS," said Trond Hugubakken, spokesman for the Norway's PST security service.

Traveling to participate in an armed conflict is rarely a crime in itself, so European security officials say they act only if they suspect a fighter has committed war crimes or might engage in terrorist activities after returning.

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