IT WAS the image of British ISIS fighter Jihadi John wielding a knife and executing terrified hostages as they kneeled before him that changed Macer Gifford’s life forever.
Watching the horror unleashed by the Islamic State unfold across Syria made the 27-year-old London banker quit his job, leave his girlfriend and travel 3,000 miles to join the fight against the terrorists.
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He would spend the next three years chasing ISIS out of villages across the wartorn nation, culminating with six weeks of sheer hell fighting in the streets of Raqqa.
It was here that Macer watched the jihadists use babies as human shields, massacre civilians waving white flags and blow up his comrades in car bombings.
The ex-banker still remembers the “smell of death” hovering over the destroyed city of Raqqa and the constant sound of bullets filling the air followed by the piercing cries of grief.
Raqqa’s scarred streets were a far cry from where Macer had grown up in rural Cambridgeshire with his two brothers or central London where he later worked as a currency trader.
The former public schoolboy would spend his days speaking to high-profile clients and selling currency before going home to his flat in the leafy borough of Battersea.
Macer, not his real name, would live for the weekend and go on as many holidays as his annual leave would allow with his girlfriend.
But it was spending those 40 minutes every morning reading newspapers to advise clients about the foreign markets that brought Macer face to face with what he describes as “pure evil”.
Macer told The Sun: “Every single day, we were being bombarded with images from ISIS for the first time.
“These brainless, evil people in the Middle East could reach into everyone’s homes in Britain and America, on their TV screens and in newspapers – right up to the President of the United States.”
He couldn’t unsee the images of hostages being burned alive in cages, others being flung to their deaths from buildings, or the videos of ISIS fighters joking about raping girls and trading them for guns.
And he still remembers the sheer horror he felt when he watched a sneering Jihadi John, the Islamic State’s most notorious executioner, behead his victims.
“I remember seeing the brave faces of the hostages with Jihadi John standing behind them as they read their last statements before they were killed and I felt for their families,” Macer said.
It was 2014 and Macer knew he had to do something to help – and that called for drastic action.
He’d been toying with the idea of entering politics and becoming a Tory councillor, but with the daily onslaught of horrors unfolding in Syria, Macer decided to pick up a gun instead.
In the weeks that followed, Macer quit his comfortable banking job in the City, pulled out from buying a house and broke up with his girlfriend.
Macer lied to his parents – his one regret – and told them he was going to Turkey to do some humanitarian work.
But in reality, he was travelling 3,000 miles to fight ISIS jihadists alongside the Kurds in Syria – all without any military experience.
“I was basically throwing myself into the deep end,” Macer admits, saying that his only experience of army life was being in the cadets at school.
Rather than ringing in 2015 with his family in Cambridgeshire, he was toasting the New Year in the mountains of Syria with rebel fighters.
The first few months in Syria were “pretty boring”, Macer says, with his days spent being trained up by fellow foreign fighters from Britain and America.
And then it all changed.
While his banker friends were enjoying a “brilliant” life in London, Macer and thousands of other Kurds were fighting in the alleyways of towns and cities across Syria.
But it was when they reached the ISIS capital Raqqa in 2017 where the fighting became relentless, with hundreds of Macer’s comrades dying on a weekly basis for six months.
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Raqqa was ISIS’s epicentre – and where Macer had watched with horror as Jihadi John and other ISIS terrorists executed prisoners years earlier.
But now, he was there to fight against the terrorist thugs.
He said: “Raqqa was horrendous. It was a city that became almost completely destroyed by the end of the operation to liberate it.
“The city was held by a lot of fanatical ISIS supporters that were determined to keep it at whatever cost – and they were willing to die for it.”
Brutal street battles followed between ISIS fighters and the 20,000 Kurdish fighters who were supported by the US-backed alliance of Kurdish and Arab forces.
“It was street to street fighting, alleyway to alleyway, stairwell to stairwell – and the city around us was slowly being destroyed,” Macer said.
“Every day there were cars filled with bombs that would race towards our positions and it would give us just a couple of minutes to destroy them.
“The amount of close calls we had where a car bomb would be coming down the street and an American F-16 fighter jet would come in and blow it up with a missile.”
But there were other times they weren’t so lucky.
Macer said: “It wasn’t unusual to see 20 or 30 guys killed or injured from these massive explosions.
“The Islamic State had already pre-built these suicide vehicles and they’d knocked down the walls of houses and used them as makeshift garages.
“And from the air, all the Americans could see was a house so they had no evidence of anything inside so they wouldn’t bomb it.
“It was only when we drew close to them and were 500 metres away that a suicide bomber would get inside the vehicle, turn it on, and then pull it out of the house and race towards us.”
Macer will never forget the horrors he witnessed and the scenes of utter despair.
Prisons where chains on the walls showed where hundreds had been tortured and killed, bodies of civilians and his friends amongst the rubble.
He remembers a mission where his team were tasked with finding Yazidi women who had been forced into being sex slaves for ISIS fighters.
“We were hoping that there were still women there at this brothel,” Macer says.
But they were too late. ISIS had moved the women just hours before.
Macer said: “All we found were dirty mattresses and chains on the floor.
“The women had been writing on the war and it was just a moment of complete despair for us all because we had so hoped to get to them and set them free.”
To this day, there are still thousands of Yazidi girls missing and presumed dead – or still being held prisoner by ISIS terrorists’ in the deserts of Syria and Iraq where the Islamic State fled.
The civilians living in Raqqa also became target practice for ISIS snipers.
“The civilians would come out of buildings waving white flights and calling for the Kurds to rescue them,” Macer recalls.
“But that went against everything that ISIS stood for. They saw these people as traitors, so they began to shoot at them and they began to target them in suicide bombings.
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“ISIS were wasting quite crucial infrastructure and weapons to kill the civilian.
“And the reason they were willing to do that was because it set an example to the rest of the people in the city that they wouldn’t tolerate any form of surrender or cooperation with the opposition.
“After a few months, the smell of death hovered over the city. The threat of Islamic State ambushes, of IEDs, was constant.
“We lost a lot of good people on missions where we would be pushing through the streets and we’d be ambushed.
“Other times, I saw young people who were fighting alongside us peering out of windows when they heard noises outside and being shot by snipers.”
His voice quiet, Macer added: “We lost a lot of friends in the city. I’m the only survivor in the team of foreigners that came to fight in Raqqa.”
Macer’s last mission in Syria was the battle for a hospital in central Raqqa, which had become the stronghold for the Islamic State in the city.
His team were ambushed on a road nearby and Macer watched his commander and another soldier shot dead by ISIS fighters.
He was hit by shrapnel from from a ricocheted bullet and fell to the ground.
“I crawled off the road and turned to engage the ISIS fighters that were shooting off us and I rushed off the road. I hadn’t even notice I’d been hit really, my mind went into a blur,” Macer says.
“I could hear the snap of the bullets as they cracked around my head.”
And what followed was what Macer can only describe as “24 hours of hell”.
“We came under this sustained attack with no food and no water for 24 hours,” he said.
It was only the intervention of the Americans as they bombed the area and destroyed the ISIS positions that saved their lives, Macer says.
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From there, Macer and his team fought ISIS fighters at the hospital in bloody battles.
The former banker would fire at snipers hiding near windows with his sniper rifles and blast RPGs through the openings.
“And then one day, the radio started blaring after the third day and they said stop firing at the hospital,” Macer said.
The sound of cracking bullets and explosions stopped instantly.
But when Macer looked out at the hospital from his bombed out building, he was horrified by what he was seeing.
“We turned and there was an Islamic State fighter holding a baby out of the window,” Macer says, shaking his head at the memory.
“The message was clear: We’ve got children and civilians in here, stop shooting at us.”
And then the fighting stopped.
After six months of brutal fighting against ISIS in Raqqa, the city was finally liberated in October 2017 and Macer watched the terrorists limp out of the city, broken and destroyed.
“One day, the Islamic State surrendered and we were asked not to shoot at them when they eventually left the city,” he says.
“It was a moment of relief, because for the first time I realised that the battle for Raqqa was over.
“And there was a feeling of satisfaction because I saw the Islamic State fighters limping to these buses that they’d provided for them and they drove into the desert where they’d eventually be hunted down and killed anyway.”
He said: “Finally, people were out in the streets, women were taking of their burqas that they’d been forced to wear and you could openly play music and be yourself for the first time.”
For Macer, watching ISIS surrender in Raqqa was the end of the war for him.
“For three years I’d been fighting ISIS and given up my life, and it was, as far as I was concerned, completely over for me,” Macer says.
“I’d begun to lose my fear – and the moment you lose your fear, you no longer duck when you hear things and you no longer hide and instead you want to go out and keep fighting.
“But I realised I was going down the wrong path, so I was very grateful that the war came to an end for me when Islamic State fled Raqqa.”
By the end of the fight against ISIS, 12,000 Kurds would die fighting and around 100,000 terrorists were killed.
“And when ISIS were finally defeated, there were more than 100,000 prisoners – even to this day – sitting in camps, the most famous from Britain being Shamima Begum,” Macer says.
He decided to finally go home to his family – but that wasn’t the last time Macer would pick up a uniform.
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Macer went on to fight against Vladimir Putin’s forces with foreign volunteer forces in Ukraine in 2022, helping to liberate the city of Kherson.
He spent months with Ukraine’s 131st Separate Reconnaissance Battalion, gathering intel, finding minefields and clearing treelines to make way for Kyiv’s forces.
After months fighting, he came home again to be close to his dad, who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. But within weeks of arriving back in the UK, Macer’s father passed away.
Macer is now looking towards the future and after seeing the Syrian rebels run Assad and his brutal forces out of the country is planning on going back to a country he still holds close to his heart.
He’d seen the defeat of ISIS in Raqqa in 2017 as a moment of change for Syria – but it was squandered with the country engulfed in a brutal civil war that would leave millions dead.
Now, after seven years, there’s another transformative moment in Syria’s history with the HTS rebels defeating dictator Assad who fled to Putin’s Russia.
But Macer fears that the HTS rebels might not be able to reform Syria.
“My fear for Syria is that the civil war will continue, that the rebels in Damascus, the Turkish rebels in the North and the Kurds that lead the SDF will start fighting amongst themselves to try and create one winner at the end of this.”
And Macer says that could risk the emergence of ISIS in Syria, with the terrorists taking advantage of any more chaos.
But Macer still has hope that Syria can rebuild after Assad’s regime collapsed – and the answer lies with the West supporting locals on the ground who want a better future for the country.
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EXCLUSIVE: ISIS plotting wave of terror from camps, warns general who defeated cult
By Henry Holloway, Deputy Foreign Editor
ISIS could unleash a new wave of terror by springing fighters from camps like the one holding Shamima Begum, a top general who helped defeat the death cult has revealed.
General Mazloum Abdi, who leads the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – a Kurdish-led US-backed militia, sounded the alarm over the resurgent terror group.
Speaking to The Sun in an interview with documentarian and ex-soldier Alan Duncan, Abdi said there are currently 10,000 male fighters in prisons ready to bring devastation back to the Middle East.
General Abdi revealed SDF believe that ISIS forces – which were bravely driven back by his troops – are currently organising a prisonbreak of fighters still held in Syria.
He also warned the threat of ISIS continues in the West.
General Abdi said: “The threat of jihadist groups – not just ISIS – will exist until the fundamentals they were founded on are destroyed.
“We must continue our struggle.”
He also called on the West to do more to bring these fighters to justice – and to support trials and convictions for the atrocities they committed in the Middle East.
General Abdi told The Sun: “The threat of ISIS in detention centres and camps is increasing and there is an increase in the movement of ISIS in general.
“There is a need to intensify efforts to continue to fight against ISIS if we don’t want to see a resurgence.”
READ MORE HERE
