A 25-year-old British army veteran from Accrington, England, is awaiting an appeal after being sentenced Sept. 16 to 7½ years in a Turkish prison for having fought with Kurdish rebels against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria.

Joe Robinson and his family have told various news outlets that he spent one month, July 2015, as a medic in northern Iraq with the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), the armed wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD). The PYD is the Syrian offshoot of the PKK, which is recognized as a terrorist organization by Turkey, nearly all European countries and the United States.

After that month, Robinson crossed into Syria, possibly via Turkey, to fight IS. For the next three months — depending on which media account you accept — he either fought with the legitimate, Iraqi Kurdistan government-backed peshmerga forces; worked for the YPG, but only as a medic; or actually fought as part of the YPG. Turkey is convinced Robinson chose the third option, and officials there point to photos Robinson posted on social media of himself in combat fatigues bearing the Iraqi Kurdistan flag.

Even if he did fight with the YPG, that group isn't considered a terrorist organization in the United Kingdom, and the US State Department removed the YPG from its 2017 Country Reports on Terrorism, which was released Sept. 19. In fact, the United States considered the YPG an ally to its YPG-assisted US troops battling IS in Syria.