ABC News(BAGHDAD) — He’s 28 years old. Detroit born and bred, an Army veteran. And now he is a self-described “Soldier of Christ” back in Iraq, fighting ISIS on the front lines.
“People ask me, ‘Why you?’ I come back and I say, ‘Why not? Why just me? Where’s everyone else at?'” said Brett, who requested that ABC News not use his last name, to protect his family back home.
“Jesus says, you know, ‘What you do unto the least of them, you do unto me,'” he added. “I take that very seriously.”
Brett returned to Iraq six months ago. In 2006-07, he served in the infamous “Triangle of Death,” where he said he was badly wounded in an improvised explosive device (IED) attack on his Humvee.
He returned to Iraq, he told ABC News, to defend the defenseless — to protect the Christians and others in Iraq who have been terrorized by the ISIS onslaught: driven from their homes, massacred, their women and girls raped and sold into slavery.
He is of Irish and Polish descent, raised Roman Catholic and now describes himself simply as a Christian.
Brett fights alongside a small, local Christian militia — the Dweikh Nawsha, under the command of Kurdish peshmerga forces in Iraq.
From Brett’s forward position, in the deserted Christian village of Baqofa, about eight miles from the outskirts of the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, you can see the black flags of ISIS whipping against the sky in a stiff winter wind.
ABC News joined Brett there to hear his story:
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