US Army vet and former Occupy Wall Street activist killed fighting ISIS with Kurdish YPG in Syria

Two Americans were killed last week while fighting with US-backed Kurdish YPG units near Raqqa, ISIS’ de facto capital in Syria.

Nicholas Alan Warden, 29, was killed July 5, and Robert Grodt, 28, was killed on July 6 in the same battle, the YPG said in press release on Tuesday. A British volunteer, Luke Rutter, 22, was also killed on July 5.

Little is known about how they died, but one YPG fighter said the three Westerners were with a small group returning from an operation when someone stepped on a mine and then the group started taking fire.

Warden and Rutter were badly wounded and brought back to the hospital, while Grodt supposedly died in the field, the YPG fighter said.

“The day before I had seen [Warden, Grodt, and Rutter] together,” the YPG fighter said. “Their faces were beaming; they were finally heading to the frontlines, a moment they had been waiting for, for a long time.”

In a YPG video posted on Tuesday, Warden said he was from New York and “joined the YPG to fight ISIS because of the terrorist attacks they were doing in Orlando, in San Bernadino, in Nice, in Paris.”