Stefan Bertram-Lee was fast asleep in their dorm at the YPG international training academy when the bombing started. It was around 3 AM, hours before dawn, when a friend woke them and their other classmates. All four Western volunteers were crammed into a tiny room, mattresses covering the floor. And now they were being ordered outside.

Still groggy, Bertram-Lee, who identifies as nonbinary, slipped on boots, grabbed an assault rifle, and filed out into the crisp night air of Rojava, expecting to be tested on how quickly they took their positions. “I thought it was just a drill,” Bertram-Lee recalls. YPG commanders had burst into their dorm before, shooting blanks and shouting intashar! to teach them how to respond under fire. They’d been in Syrian Kurdistan for three weeks at that point, having finished only the political portion of their training.

But when they stumbled outside and saw the flashes of light on the horizon, the cadets knew it was the real thing. The Turkish Air Force was bombing a nearby YPG (People’s Protection Units) base, part of their brutal “anti-terrorist” campaign against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Even with only a couple weeks of training, Bertram-Lee and the other cadets kept their cool. “We all acted how we were supposed to,” Bertram-Lee says from their grandmother’s flat in the northeast of England, still impressed with how quickly they’d adapted to life on the front lines.