The commander of an international volunteers’ brigade linked to a Yazidi force in Iraq’s Sinjar region has rejected allegations that they are fighting against the Turkish army and Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.

“We are here to defend the autonomy of this region. We are not here to fight Turkey or Iraq. We are here to fight DAESH,” said the commander, a 52-year old Spaniard, whose nom de guerre is Bahoz. He was using the Arab acronym for the Islamic State.

The commander of the international wing of the Sinjar Resistance Units (YBS) was reacting to allegations leveled against the Yazidi militia by three foreign volunteers who fled their unit last month, amid spiraling tensions pitting the YBS against Iraqi government forces and Iraqi Kurdish authorities. 

Two Americans, Vincent Mark Alexander and Jean Devol, and a British man, Emre Edwards, were reportedly “rescued” by Peshmerga fighters attached to the Kurdistan Regional Government in late April. In a 14-minute video published May 4, by the Kurdistan Region’s Security Council, the men accuse recruiters for the YBS’ international arm of lying about the true nature of their job, which they thought was to fight IS. Instead, they claimed they were “deceived” into fighting their countries’ “allies,” Turkey and Iraq, and forced into digging tunnels “with our bare hands.”