Heval

In 2014 the Islamic State burst onto the world stage.

A track record of brutality,

executions, mass beheadings.

I loved America and I felt a debt to America

and I hadn't paid her back.

I get a phone call and this guy said, "Is this is Michael?

You want to join the YPG?

Are you ready to fight?

Are you willing to die?"

I said, "Yes."

I pray, I say, "Lord, let your will be done in this area,

but I really wanna kill them."

And then it's like boom!

Then it's fight time.

And it was just bedlam.

Absolute bedlam.

Our nostrils were full of the smell of the dead.

Snipers were everywhere.

And they either run,

or they ended up dead.

So here you see that within this man is some real rage.

But some people think that he was not sincere

in what he was doing.

Like who's this old British dude.

Oh, he's a movie star coming here for publicity.

A successful Hollywood actor,

flying in for six months and then bug out the other way.

This actor who is becoming a militia fighter.

I mean, come on.

What would you say to that?

Turn it off.

So, we had doubts about every bit of Michael's story.

Heval!

And set.

Are you ready?

My name is Michael Enright.

I'm a professional actor.

Captain, a ship's been spotted.

I was in "Pirates of the Caribbean" with Orlando Bloom.

I worked with Bradley Cooper, John Travolta, Robin Williams.

I also did "Knight and Day" with Tom Cruise.

Diesel hydraulic.

It's a diesel hydraulic.

I did "JAG," "Cold Case," "CSI," "Agents of Shield."

I loved acting, I'd been acting since I was a little boy.

Ever since when I got on a TV show

called "Get it Together" in Manchester.

Even before that, I can remember we were doing school plays

and I'd be cracking jokes and people would laugh

their butts off.

And I liked that reaction.

You know, like, oh, all right.

And then another thing was we had a lot of

American television and watching that I thought,

ooh, I wanna go there.

Everything about America was just so wow to me.

'Cause it was exciting and fun and crazy.

It was just everything I felt inside of me.

And I couldn't wait to get there.

And I made it, I couldn't believe I had done it.

I was, oh, loved it.

Holy shit!

Oh, my God.

I remember waking up on 9/11

and Howard Stern came on the radio.

A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.

You're kidding?

A second plane might have crashed

and the second building is on fire.

And when I heard him say that I jumped up, ran to the TV

and there it was.

What came down? It crashed!

The other Trade Center's down, it's down.

It's down.

I remember shortly after that, I just cried.

Every day I was just crying.

All these stories of all these people

that had been butchered.

And then it switched from pain to anger.

I was so angry.

I loved America and I felt a debt to America

and I hadn't paid her back.

All's I've done is sort of take.

So I decided I was gonna sign up with the American Army

and I'm gonna go and fight her enemies.

I called to join up and I left a message,

I want to go and fight in Afghanistan, call me back please.

And they never called and so I never went.

And that became the biggest regret of my life.

June, 2014, Islamic State forces

celebrating after astonishing the world.

Sweeping from Syria through Northern Iraq to Mosul.

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,

also known as ISIS, has rapidly morphed

into the world's most dangerous jihadist organization.

I remember when I heard about ISIS,

it brought back all those feelings that I'd had at 9/11.

It all came flooding back.

They've established themselves

as the most recognizable terror brand in the world.

Al-Qaeda is almost considered moderate these days.

In 2014, the Middle East was just ripped apart

by an unparalleled level of violence.

ISIS was marching incredibly quickly through Iraq and Syria.

Literally in about 100 days, ISIS had conquered

an area of territory around the size of Cuba.

I started seeing new stories about

this new terrorist organization called the Islamic State.

Ethnic cleansing mass executions, beheadings,

it was the most evil barbaric thing I had seen.

And what made it worse for me was Jihadi John.

I'm back Obama and I'm back because of your arrogant

foreign policy towards the Islamic State,

despite our serious warnings.

It was an Englishman cutting off the head of an American,

an innocent American with his hands tied behind his back.

So just as your missiles continue to strike our people,

our knife will continue to strike the necks of your people.

And it was antithesis of how I felt about America.

Were so grateful to America and the American people

for everything I'd had in that life that I've lived there.

And he was doing that.

It just was like an onslaught.

First they get an American and cut his head off.

And then there's an Englishman, then the Japanese,

and Muath, the Jordanian pilot.

That was a very difficult one to watch.

They poured paraffin on him, put him in a cage

and then they lit it and it went right in

and burned him alive.

And I thought, no.

Last week, fleeing execution, rape,

and slavery at the hands of so-called Islamic State,

tens of thousands of Yazidis fled for their lives

through the Syrian desert.

And then, I heard about the Yazidis on the news.

These people who lived in the Sengal Sinjar Mountains.

Learned that ISIS had gone into that region

and literally butchered all the men.

The Islamic State believed many different things.

They thought the Yazidis were devil worshipers.

Believed in shooting boys and men in ditches,

enslaving women.

Some girls as young as three years old,

were sold into sexual slavery by the Islamic State.

They gang raped the women, they sold them in markets.

And I would see the videos on YouTube.

How much for the blue-eyed Yazidi?

I think many people in the west and beyond

were quite appalled and disgusted by this.

And also disgusted by what seemed to be

the inaction of western governments.

When the attacks against the Yazidis happened,

there was a call for humanitarian intervention

and this led to airdrops of supplies.

But the United States and Britain had just spent 10 years

in the occupation of Iraq

and there was absolutely no interest in going back in

and putting boots on the ground

to fight another conflict in the region.

Well, when I saw that stuff, all of these videos,

it made me sick, not just what ISIS was doing,

killing civilians, but that armies weren't clamoring

to go fight them.

I remember I was like, what?

This was so horrible, what they were doing.

And so I wanted to hit them back.

I mean, there's no talking to that kind of mentality.

You have to have action and they need to be stopped.

And so I wanted to be part of that.

And I started making steps to go.

When I was asked to do an in depth profile

of Michael Enright in late 2019,

I didn't automatically jump at the story.

We had doubts about every bit of Michael's story,

from day one of the story, all the way up

to the present time.

It sounds like something from the mind

of a Hollywood script writer.

But I made a couple of phone calls

and there was really something there.

What really grabbed my interest was the complexity

of Michael's need to get involved

and risk his life for people he'd never met.

It's what makes him an intriguing character.

I wanted to go and fight ISIS,

but I knew England and America were not at the time.

So I needed to find out exactly who was on the ground.

The Kurdish military

has been America's most reliable partner

in the war against ISIS.

They've done most of the fighting

and almost all of the dying.

The Kurds are often described as the largest ethnic group

without a state of their own.

And that's probably fair.

I mean, right now there are about 30 odd million Kurds

scattered across the four states, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran,

and they have no state.

When the struggle against Islamic State emerged in Syria,