An actor with a fair share of action projects opened up to an Arabic TV network today about his decision to leave Hollywood and fight ISIS alongside the Kurds.
“ISIS, they need to be wiped off, completely, the face of this earth. They’re a stain on humanity, and this is a call. It’s not just a Kurdish call, this is a call to humanity to obliterate them,” Michael Enright told UAE’s Al Aan TV (the above video has Arabic newscasters but his interview is in English).
“I’ve been to the Middle East before, and I actually really like the Arabic people,” he said, noting that he’s studied some Islam to learn more about the people there.
Enright, 51, has 29 TV and film credits including Alias, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Knight and Day, Law & Order: LA, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
ISIS caught his attention, Enright said, “when they cut off an American journalist’s head.”
“And what was even worse for me is that it was an Englishman who did it,” he added, referring to “Jihadi John.”
“I love America with all my heart, and it was an Englishman who did it to an American citizen. And I thought, oh, wow, I gotta try and help right that wrong. And then he did it to the Englishman and then the Japanese. And then I found out about Yazidi people — I’d never heard of Yazidis before.”
Finding out that Yazidi men and boys were being slaughtered and the women and girls turned into rape victims was “too much,” the actor said.
“And then the straw that broke the camel’s back, I guess, was the Jordanian pilot, when they burned him alive. And that’s when I decided I was gonna come.”
Enright described the Iraqi Shiites like “the French of the Middle East… they just give up. They just keep surrendering and giving all our weapons that we citizens have paid for over to the enemy.”
“But the Kurds weren’t. The Kurds were fighting. And I thought, ‘I want to join them, because that’s my spirit’ — I didn’t come here to run, I came here to fight, and if I have to die then I die.”
Enright acknowledges he might not see his family and friends again in this life.
“I didn’t come here for a party,” he said, acknowledging that while clearing a house of ISIS IEDs it felt like “something out of the movies.”
The actor stressed that he’s squarely focused on killing ISIS.
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