“We’re here to offer assistance. The last thing we want is to be seen as cowboys playing war in a place not our own,” Michael Wagnon told Al-Monitor in Amman, Jordan, awaiting a connecting flight to Erbil, Iraq. Wagnon is a former US Navy medic and founding member of Qalubna Ma’kum (Arabic for “Our hearts are with you”), a group of foreign volunteers serving in the peshmerga, the military of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq.

At least several dozen foreigners are volunteering with the peshmerga at present. But unlike past volunteers from Europe, North America, Australia and elsewhere, Qalubna Ma’kum is largely focused on providing medical treatment and training, as opposed to participating in combat directly. They believe this will improve the image of foreign volunteers in Iraq and better help defeat the Islamic State (IS). Peshmerga commanders on the front lines welcome this new contribution.

Qalubna Ma’kum was established in 2015 by Wagnon and three other volunteers from the United States, France and Russia. Kat Argo leads the group, going by the pen name she created while covering the war in Ukraine as a freelance journalist. Previously, Argo was an intelligence officer and analyst in the US Army who deployed to Afghanistan three times. Wagnon too deployed to Afghanistan while in the Navy.

They arrived in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region in December 2015. They are presently near Kirkuk, Iraq, in a peshmerga unit with both Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Kurdistan Democratic Party officers, according to Argo.