When the History Channel gets serious, it can still offer solid stories like its new Hunting ISIS.
Hunting ISIS, a six-part series that premieres Tuesday at 10 p.m. on History and then will air starting June 3 on Viceland, follows a small group of Americans who have joined up with the Kurdish military as unpaid volunteers in the fight against the Islamic State.
These Americans, who probably total around 100, are mostly ex-military themselves. Frustrated that the U.S. doesn’t have combat troops on the front lines, they’ve gone rogue and joined a team that does.
They’re doing it, they say, because they’re appalled at the atrocities committed by ISIS and they can’t abide sitting on the sidelines of the battle to push ISIS out of the cities it began capturing in 2014.
That’s one reason.
They also crave the action.
PJ, a 29-year-old volunteer, speaks not only for himself when he says he’s never found an adrenalin rush that matches combat.
Pete, 27, recounts how he returned to civilian life after tours of duty in the Middle East and found himself becoming an aimless alcoholic.
As a combat medic, he’s a prize catch here, and he says he finds purpose and satisfaction in saving lives of both soldiers and civilians.
He also says the whole situation is screwed up almost beyond comprehension and that in many ways that also describes him. He can call to mind the Christopher Walken character in The Deer Hunter, which is as scary as it sounds.
Equally scary: the footage taken by filmmaker Sebastiano Tomada during the two years he spent embedded with these U.S. fighters.
It’s raw stuff, and to its credit, History clearly realizes it needs no added hype to make Hunting ISIS a somber snapshot of the combat zones in the Middle East these days.
PJ jokingly tells his pal Norway that he wouldn’t call it Mad Max. It’s more like the zombie apocalypse. Shot after shot shows huge swaths of cities, once normal and functioning, that now look like Hiroshima.
Our guys, naturally, put all this at the feet of ISIS, whose members are portrayed as fanatic sociopaths who sell women into slavery and gun down small children whose only offense is joining their families in trying to flee villages that have become killing fields.
To PJ and the others, their mission is simple. Most Americans consider ISIS dangerous terrorists. Most Americans can’t or won’t physically fight them. So these men say they’re stepping in to do it for them.
Even beyond the combat, that’s not easy. Americans aren’t supposed to be doing what these volunteers are doing, which means if they are apprehended, they could be thrown in jail.
Just to get to the Kurdish YPG units with which they are fighting, they have to take a circuitous route to secret locations from which they are smuggled into the country.
You could loosely call them soldiers of fortune, except they’d probably laugh at the description because none of them are paid. All they get is food, clothing and shelter. And, of course, uniforms, weapons and ammo.
Tomada takes care not to politicize or romanticize what these Americans are doing. He takes a documentarian’s approach, trusting his two years of interviews and footage to tell the story.
In the long term, the work of these volunteers may become a modest footnote in the ancient and deeply rooted conflicts of the Middle East.
But as an intense examination of what would make someone do something like this, Hunting ISIS offers honest insights without judgment.