Joshua Washburn said his role in Syria was often meeting with the residents. (Boston Globe)
NESTOR RAMOS, The Boston Globe
SPRINGFIELD (AP) — 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.
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.”
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.
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:
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?
One of perhaps a couple hundred Americans to join the fighting in Syria, Washburn plunged himself last winter into a bloody, chaotic civil war that has sent millions of refugees scrambling across the country’s craggy borders.
Volunteers like Washburn typically join groups such as the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, Kurdish militia fighters who are assisted by airstrikes from a coalition that includes the United States. They are among the only active ground resistance to Islamic State militants in control of much of the country.
While Americans who fight for the Islamic State — a State Department spokeswoman said there are maybe a dozen doing so — potentially face terrorism or even treason charges, joining a foreign army such as YPG is not illegal under American law. Unpaid foreign fighters like Washburn furnish much of their own equipment, supplied only with an AK-47 and ammunition. They rely on personal savings or fundraising to make the trip.
Some are ex-military, returning to the fight after tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. And there are those like Keith Broomfield, a 36-year-old Hudson man, who had no military training at all. He was killed in the Syrian city of Kobani earlier this year.
Washburn, whose criminal history made enlistment nearly impossible, was in the latter category. Thick limbed, with cropped hair and military bearing despite no service background, he believed his troubled childhood and five years in jail had prepared him to live in hard conditions — to sleep in squalor and survive on little food.
“I know it’s hard to compare Springfield to Syria,” Washburn said. “But if you’re used to chaos, and you can adjust quickly and adapt, you do OK.”
Pain is hard to prepare for: The next day, his leg broken and his foot dislocated, he hopped back up the mountain while holding the shoulders of fellow soldiers. Soon, just a month after he’d set off for Syria and before he ever saw action, he was back in the United States, where it took a 6-inch rod and eight screws to reassemble his leg.
As he recuperated, Washburn and his two daughters, now 10 and 8 and living with their mother, spent time with his half-sister, Krystal, in Webster.
By May, his leg still balky, he was itching to get back to the battlefields. And though Krystal pleaded with him — even threatened to disown him — he set out once again for Syria.
“I will be leaving in the next few days to return to Syria,” he wrote on Facebook. “The Kurdish people have been strong and steadfast in their fight for freedom, respect and an opportunity to live in peace. The rest of the world has turned their back on them and I refuse to do so.”
To understand why Washburn signed up for a war on the other side of the world, don’t search the bombed-out border towns and war-ravaged villages where he spent the last several months.
Start instead in Springfield, where the world once turned its back on Josh Washburn.
Washburn was 8 when he first landed in foster care. The false hope of reunification with his family — the stepmother who he said was violent with him and the father he said did not protect him — lingered just long enough to spoil any chance he had of being adopted. He bounced from one home to another in the years that followed, shuttling among nearly 60 by the time he was 18.
His early life in and around Springfield drifted between the chaotic and the criminal. But Washburn has always believed that God was looking out for him when no one else was.
One night in 1995, Washburn said, when he was 16 and sleeping on a friend’s couch after running away from yet another foster home, some members of Springfield’s Eastern Avenue Posse gang burst through the door. Washburn said he wasn’t affiliated with a gang, but his friends were Crips — rivals of the men who were robbing and shooting up the house.
In his retelling, everyone inside scattered and scrambled for the doors. Outside, Washburn came face to face with a man holding a shotgun. The man pointed the barrel at his head.
Why, Washburn says he wondered, was he about to die? “I didn’t do anything to these people,” he remembers thinking.
The man pulled the trigger.
Maybe the gun was empty. Maybe it misfired. Either way, Washburn was alive and unharmed: God had made him bulletproof.
Two years later, Washburn was walking along Avenue A in Turners Falls when he came upon a raging fire in an old bank building that had been converted into apartments. One man died in the blaze, jumping from the upper floors to his death in an attempt to escape.
“I knew there were a ton of people in there,” Washburn recounted. He said he didn’t think twice. He ran into the flames, rescuing a man from the fire.
Scars from the burns still line his tattooed forearms, but, he believed, God had made him fireproof that night.
He was also blessed with charisma and eloquence, introspection and charm. He was basically a good boy, those who knew and worked with him back then said, raised in an environment that never taught him how to be a good man.
“He’s a very memorable young man,” said Alan Rubin, a public defender who represented Washburn on a handful of occasions. A decade after he last heard from Washburn, he still has a picture of Washburn up on the wall of his office.
“I don’t have too many clients’ pictures on the wall,” Rubin said.
The next year, Washburn pleaded guilty to a drug charge. He’d fled a Montague police officer while carrying several bags of crack and a pager only to run into a state trooper, according to an account in the Greenfield Reporter.
The judge sentenced Washburn to 2½ years in a house of correction, with one year already served. Behind bars, Washburn finally found a home of sorts. For the first time, he had food and shelter and friends.
At Hampshire County House of Correction in 2001, he was one of a handful of inmates who joined the nonprofit Performance Project, an effort to use the performing arts as a tool for rehabilitation and growth.
“It became clear really early on that Josh wanted to tell his story,” said Aime Dowling, one of the nonprofit’s founders, who worked with Washburn at the jail. Together the men in the project wrote a play about their lives. They named it for the number of foster homes in which Washburn had spent time: “59 Places.”
When the prisoners performed the play, it was for an audience of family, friends, and law enforcement officials from the area.
“There were judges, parole officers,” Dowling said. “The DA came. The chief of police, the sheriff. … There was this whole audience that was seeing Josh in a different way — in the context of his life.”
When he was due to be released, his many friends — fellow inmates and staff alike — were thrilled. Washburn was not.
“He was saying, ‘It’s not so great getting out. Jail is actually the only place where I knew I’d have had a roof over my head, food, and people who are my friends,’?” said Washburn’s longtime therapist, who spoke to the Globe with his permission but asked that her name not be published.
The last time Washburn ran afoul of the law was a probation violation incurred when he was charged with leaving the scene of a car accident in 2003. Washburn, whose girlfriend had just given birth to his first daughter, now had a real family. Suddenly, he was desperate to stay out of jail.
At a 2005 hearing, “probation was asking for me to be held,” Washburn said. But the judge vouched for Washburn, who hadn’t been in any trouble in the year or so since his arrest stemming from the car crash.
The judge, Washburn said, had been in the audience at the jail years earlier. She had seen “59 Places.” She required Washburn to check in with her personally and let him go free.
He got a job installing cable television and steadily rose up the ladder. Seven years after he last set foot in a courtroom, Washburn said, he was an operations director for a multistate telecommunications company. A few years after that, he left to start his own business. He bounced among states — New Hampshire, Florida, and finally Virginia, where a mentor persuaded Washburn to join his family at church.
The more he heard, the more he became convinced that God — a God he now knew in the Christian tradition, rather than through his own homespun understanding — had something big in store for him.
Watching the news one night, he heard about the civil war in Syria, and the Islamic State’s attacks on the Kurdish people. As he learned more, he became convinced that if ISIS had the capability, it would attack the United States.
Put simply, he said, ISIS is a bully that someone needed to stand up to.
“I would much rather face them on a battlefield there then have my daughters face them in a mall, church, or school here at home,” he said. “If people don’t stand up to evil and end it, it eventually makes its way here.”
He found support for his beliefs in scripture: In Jeremiah, ancestors of the modern-day Kurds were used by God to destroy Babylon.
“Sharpen the arrows, fill the quivers!” Jeremiah 51:11 commands. And so he did.
Washburn sold everything to make enough money for the trip. He shuttered his telecommunications business and set out for Syria, with the Lions of Rojava, a group that recruits Westerners to fight for the YPG.
Washburn said every trial he endured — from his rocky childhood to jail and beyond — prepared him for this.
“Every single thing added a little bit of strength,” he said.
Back in Syria in the summer, Washburn walked amid the destruction with similarly motivated men from around the world.
Westerners are largely kept off the front lines — “Having you here is great for them,” Washburn explained, “but having you die is bad for them” — but gunfire and explosions echoed in the distance. Down dusty alleys, Washburn stumbled upon the charred and dismembered remains of Islamic State fighters. In a short video, a head and torso sit in an empty street, limbs on the ground a little ways away.
For both the citizens and the soldiers, the conditions have been brutal.
“You see a lot of women and children living in the same homes that were hit with airstrikes,” Washburn said in a phone interview from over there. “You’re sleeping with bugs, you’re sleeping with trash, you’re eating almost nothing,” Washburn said.
Instead of fighting against ISIS, Westerners like Washburn mostly do propaganda work, wandering areas that have already been taken by YPG, meeting and taking photos with locals, in an effort to show broad support for their cause.
In mid-August he persuaded his commanding officers to allow him to join a YPG team that deactivates Islamic State mines and trip wires. With little equipment, they work by hand, Washburn said. Trained by an Iraqi antiterrorism soldier, they feel their way down dirt roads. In June, an Australian man was killed and five fighters were injured when he stepped on a mine during a night sabotage mission.
Last week, the unit took a break. Washburn returned to the United States.
He had dropped about 45 pounds, he said, from a muscular 225 to a gaunt 180, the thinnest he’s been as an adult. He went to work installing cable and Internet service in Houston, where he is saving up money to buy a land-mine detector and to return to Syria.
“The hardest part, coming back, it’s like nobody even understands,” Washburn said. “Normal people don’t get up and fight somebody else’s war.”
Joshua Washburn has never been normal.
When Dowling, who last saw Washburn during their days as a jailhouse performing arts troupe, learned from Washburn’s therapist that he had gone to the other side of the world to fight against ISIS, she said, she was shocked but not necessarily surprised.
“I think about the rupture in early childhood that occurred,” Dowling said. “It’s an interesting thing to think about — somebody who has been deemed unacceptable in our culture really looking for places where he can be a hero.”
Washburn’s sister, who pleaded with him not to go and threatened to disown him if he left his daughters behind again, said the roots of his decision extend deep into his childhood.
“I don’t know if it’s from growing up in foster care or if it was from him being in and out of jail, but he just takes it on himself to protect everyone around him,” said Krystal Washburn. She said she is often at a loss to explain her half-brother’s decisions. “I think part of that is because he never, never had anyone to protect him.”
Washburn’s therapist, with whom he stayed in touch long after she met him in jail, said he had always been looking for something he never quite found.
“People who’ve had some parental nourishment and then lost it, they then try to get it back. They try within the family; but his family situation was really miserable,” she said. “If that doesn’t work, then they go outside the family and try to get it from the school. If that doesn’t work, they go into the world at large.”
The last time she talked to him, before he left for Syria the first time, she begged him not to go.
“Josh, you need to reconsider this,” she told him.
He told her he had to do it.
This was where Josh Washburn’s life had led.
