When Ryan O’Leary went to war for the third time, he was expecting to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), the militant group that has captured vast swathes of Iraq and Syria.

After serving with the Iowa National Guard in Iraq in 2007-8 and then in Afghanistan in 2010-11, he went back to Iraq earlier this year of his own volition. The intention, hetold the Des Moines Register in June, was to train Kurdish soldiers — the Peshmerga — to drive ISIS out of its northern Iraqi strongholds. “ISIS isn’t just a fight for them,” he said then. “It’s a fight for all of us.”

But the 28-year-old’s journey took a slightly different direction once he got to Iraq. Now, O’Leary is patrolling the border between Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan embedded with a faction of the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) deep in the Qandil mountains.

And he’s training the soldiers not to fight ISIS, but Iranian forces he says are repressing Kurdish minorities in the region. “I’ve pretty much changed my view,” he tells TIME in a telephone interview. “There’s no difference between Iran and ISIS, they do the exact same thing to these people. It’s just not reported as much.”

A former soldier unveils how the US coalition is ‘liberating’ Iraq from the Islamic State through war crimes

This exclusive is published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project

The US-led war on the ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS/ISIL/IS) has brought the US back into Fallujah. Once again, the stated objective is to root out terrorists — but as with operations in Fallujah during the 2003 Iraq War, it is overwhelmingly civilians who are being killed.

Two weeks ago, the Pentagon announced that US airstrikes had been conducted near Fallujah in coordination with the Iraqi government against ISIS targets. “Four airstrikes struck land features denying ISIL a tactical advantage and destroyed two ISIL buildings, an ISIL VBIED, two ISIL heavy machine guns and an ISIL obstruction,” declared a Department of Defense (DoD) press release.

Haifa Zangana asks: in country awash with terror and corruption, in whose hands does power really lie?

When the Iraqis took to the streets in 16 of the 18 Iraqi governorates in 2011, the "silent" Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists, invisible to the public, spoke up and warned the protestors against bad services and corruption as well as from the exploitation of their protests by "infiltrators" trying to harm Iraq.

Nouri Al-Maliki, the prime minister at the time and who is backed by the Guardianship, had labelled the peaceful protestors as terrorists. The day before the protest, Al-Maliki made a nationally televised statement on an official Iraqi television channel saying: "I call upon you not to participate in tomorrow's demonstration because it is suspicious... those behind this protest are Saddamists, terrorists and Al-Qaeda."

The result was shots being fired at the protestors and the death of 29 of them, including one child. Nearly 300 people were arrested, including prominent journalists, artists and lawyers, as a means of intimidation. In addition to the Guardianship, i.e. Ali Al-Sistani, Muqtada Al-Sadr also proposed, during the most critical time of the sectarian government, to give the government 100 days to make reforms.

Key allies in the US and UK led war on Islamic State (IS) are covertly financing the terrorist movement according to senior political sources in the region. US and British oil companies are heavily invested in the murky geopolitical triangle sustaining IS’ black market oil sales.

The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq and Turkish military intelligence have supported secret IS oil smuggling operations and supplied arms to the terror group, according to Kurdish, Iraqi and Turkish officials.

One British oil company in particular, Genel Energy, is contracted by the KRG to supply oil for a major Kurdish firm accused of facilitating IS oil sales to Turkey. The Kurdish firm has close ties to the Iraqi Kurdish government.

Genel operates in the KRG with the backing of the British government, and is also linked to a British parliamentary group with longstanding connections to both the British and KRG oil industries.

​For the Middle East, the growth of the self-proclaimed Islamic State has been a catastrophe. For one American firm, it’s been a gold mine.

The war against ISIS isn’t going so great, with the self-appointed terror group standing up to a year of U.S. airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.

But that hasn’t kept defense contractors from doing rather well amidst the fighting. Lockheed Martin has received orders for thousands of more Hellfire missiles. AM General is busy supplying Iraq with 160 American-built Humvee vehicles, while General Dynamics is selling the country millions of dollars worth of tank ammunition.

SOS International, a family-owned business whose corporate headquarters are in New York City, is one of the biggest players on the ground in Iraq, employing the most Americans in the country after the U.S. Embassy. On the company’s board of advisors: former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz—considered to be one of the architects of the invasion of Iraq—and Paul Butler, a former special assistant to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld.