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.
