How an Anarchist Bitcoin Coder Found Himself Fighting ISIS in Syria

On a desert-cold, moonlit night just over two years ago, Amir Taaki stepped off the Iraqi sand into a rubber dinghy floating in the Tigris River. The boat was just wide enough to fit his compact body next to the much larger American ex-Army machine gunner sitting beside him. Taaki and the dozens of soldiers waiting on the shore were part of a motley crew of Kurds and foreigners from as far away as Britain, Portugal, Canada and the US, and they’d spent the last two weeks waiting anxiously in a mountain camp of Kurdish guerrillas.