“ISIS asked us for a cease-fire two days ago,” Kino told me. “They asked us for a safe pass out of Hasakah. The forces here refused to do that, because we want to finish them.”

My translator, an Assyrian American named Helma Adde, stood with me and Kino Gabriel, the 24-year-old spokesman for the Assyrian Christian army of the Syriac Military Council. We were in the city of al-Hasakah, near the banks of the Khabour River and about 700 meters from the front line of the Islamic State in eastern Syria.

For all the doubts that the West has about the war in which he is fighting, Kino was optimistic about how the battle is going in this neighborhood. “Some of our forces have made it to the mountain and have surrounded ISIS in Hasakah,” he said, pointing past the Islamic State positions, toward a towering hill far to the southwest of the city. “I think within two weeks they will be surrounded completely. We will begin an offensive from inside Hasakah and outside to overwhelm them. We hope in one month it will be over here.”

It surprised me to see a thousand-man Christian army fighting alongside Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units) forces on the front lines against the fanatics of the Islamic State. It’s not that I had been unaware of the Syriac Military Council (abbreviated MFS) — I had actually written about them previously. But this was not the sort of operation that they would be allowed to participate in, a front-line fight in peshmerga-controlled Iraqi Kurdistan. In Syria, Christians and Kurds fight in collaboration, but independently.

Kino and his men view themselves as the protectors of those few who dared stay behind in a town with a rich Christian history and a large Christian minority. In fact, many take perpetual vows to protect and preserve the Assyrian national identity. Hasakah is home to nine churches, in addition to roughly 40 mosques.

ISIS units reached Hasakah in August 2014, during the group’s sweeping offensive into northern Iraq, advancing into the town’s outlying neighborhoods. But they never took the city, which was divided into three sections: one controlled by ISIS, another by Assad’s Syrian army, and a third by YPG and Syriac forces. ISIS fighters had initially carved out neighborhoods in Hasakah but were gradually losing ground by the time I arrived in July.

Read the article “Kurds and Christians Fight Back against ISIS in Syria” on nationalreview.com.