In Fighting ISIS, Massachusetts Man Finds His Cause

Joshua Washburn (right), a 36- year-old native of 

Springfield, went to Syria on his own earlier this year 

to fight with a militia against the Islamic State.

Shrouded in darkness and silence, the small squad of soldiers hiked down a mud-slathered mountain along the Syrian border with their rifles and little else.

“Mud for days,” Joshua Washburn thought.

Marching at night to avoid detection by Islamic State forces, Washburn, a 36-year-old from Springfield who had come halfway around the world to join the war, couldn’t see the slippery ground under his feet. His boots soaked through and packed with clods of mud, he changed into a pair of sneakers.

Joshua Washburn said his role in Syria was often 
meeting with the residents.

But when Washburn’s foot slipped on the jagged, rocky terrain, his left ankle buckled, flashing white-hot pain across his body.

Lying in the mud and darkness of the unlit Syrian night in March, Washburn was finally afraid.

“I don’t want to die here in Syria,” he recalled thinking, “thousands of miles away from my family.”

Joshua Washburn at age 5

God had protected him for so long, he thought. The God he prayed to as a child had kept him alive, despite a chaotic and violent youth in Springfield that saw him shuttled from one foster home to another; had watched over him during the years he spent in jail; had given him two daughters and, with them, hope; had turned his life around. And now, that same God had led him to this place, armed with an AK-47 and a couple weeks of rudimentary training, and seemed prepared to strand him on this grimy mountain?

The men he’d been marching with, many of them fellow Westerners he had met when he arrived in the Middle East, would have to go on without him. Soldiers from a Kurdish militia — men he’d only just met, and who spoke no English — would take him to get help.

Joshua Washburn with locals in Syria

His delicate circumstance gave rise to another, darker idea: “They don’t need me anymore.” The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, he knew, offers cash bounties for Westerners who can be used as high-profile fodder for their gruesome videos.

Men he barely knew were bearing him down the mountain and into a war zone. What incentive would they have to keep him alive, now that he couldn’t fight? Could he find himself in ISIS’s grip? Would his little girls one day have to watch as, in grainy online video, a blade slid across his throat?

For perhaps the first time since he set foot in Iraq on his way to the battle-ravaged border towns he hoped to help protect, he allowed himself to consider the question that has confounded his friends and family:

Joshua Washburn with one of his two daughters. His 

daughters are now 10 and 8

Why would this magnetic young man who had overcome so many obstacles and remade his life anew, leave it all behind to take up arms in a fight on the other side of the world?

What in God’s name was Josh Washburn doing here?

Read the rest of the story HERE.

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