It was close to midnight on the coast of Libya, a few miles west of Tripoli. At the water’s edge, armed Libyan smugglers pumped air into thirty-foot rubber dinghies. Some three thousand refugees and migrants, mostly sub-Saharan Africans, silent and barefoot, stood nearby in rows of ten. Oil platforms glowed in the Mediterranean.

The Libyans ordered male migrants to carry the inflated boats into the water, thirty on each side. They waded in and held the boats steady as a smuggler directed other migrants to board, packing them as tightly as possible. People in the center would suffer chemical burns if the fuel leaked and mixed with water. Those straddling the sides could easily fall into the sea. Officially, at least five thousand and ninety-eight migrants died in the Mediterranean last year, but Libya’s coastline is more than a thousand miles long, and nobody knows how many boats sink without ever being seen. Several of the migrants had written phone numbers on their clothes, so that someone could call their families if their bodies washed ashore.

The smugglers knelt in the sand and prayed, then stood up and ordered the migrants to push off. One pointed to the sky. “Look at this star!” he said. “Follow it.” Each boat left with only enough fuel to reach international waters.

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Brace Belden can’t remember exactly when he decided to give up his life as a punk-rocker turned florist turned boxing-gym manager in San Francisco, buy a plane ticket to Iraq, sneak across the border into Syria, and take up arms against the Islamic State. But as with many major life decisions, Belden, who is 27 — “a true idiot’s age,” in his estimation — says it happened gradually and then all at once.

For several years, Belden had been reading about Rojava, a large swath of northern Syria that had been carved out by a Kurdish political party and its military wing, the YPG (or People’s Protection Units), in the ruins of Syria’s civil war. The YPG had become one of the most effective bulwarks against ISIS, so much so that the Pentagon had offered support, and Western volunteers, many of them military veterans, had started enlisting. But Belden was less interested in the YPG’s battlefield victories than in what it was trying to build: a semi-autonomous region operating under a more or less socialist system. To Belden, who’d identified as a Marxist since he was a teenager, Rojava looked like Spain in 1936: Capitalism reigned supreme, and fascism was on the march, but here was an opportunity to halt the latter and foment revolution against the former. After several months of wondering whether he was truly prepared to kill for his political beliefs, and several more figuring out how to actually join a Kurdish militia, Belden told his girlfriend that he was going to Syria to do humanitarian work and got on a plane.

When I first talked to Belden, in November, he had been in Syria for two months and was looking forward to his first shower in weeks. “Incredibly filthy right down to the bone,” he said via text message. It was Thanksgiving Day in America, but Belden wasn’t celebrating. His tabor, or platoon, had spent the past three weeks advancing on Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital, clearing villages of ISIS fighters along the way. They were resting in an abandoned grain silo near Ayn Issa, where a U.S. Navy officer had just been killed by an IED. “Part of me knew what I was getting into,” Belden said. “But when I got here, it sort of hit me: Oh, shit, I joined a Third World army that’s fighting ISIS.”

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