A British actor left Hollywood to fight ISIS - now he's marooned in Belize
SAN IGNACIO, Belize - It sounded like death made airborne in those brutal days in Raqqa.
Bullets screamed across the ruined streets in swarms thicker than flies on roadkill. Machine guns rattled.
And the rocket-propelled grenades. Those were the worst. They hammered down with awful concussive thuds, smashing cinder block into choking clouds of powder
For days in that sweltering October of 2017, Michael Enright crouched in an apartment building turned battle station, staring into the maw of the last Islamic State stronghold in Syria. Enright was the most unlikely of soldiers, pinned down there alongside his Kurdish and expat militia brothers, dodging bullets, blasting away with his Kalashnikov rifle, wondering whether these might be his last moments on earth.
"It felt like the devil himself was breathing fire on me," Enright says.
Less than two years earlier, Enright - a Hollywood actor by way of Britain - had been tooling around Los Angeles in an aging black Porsche 911 and hobnobbing with movie stars at awards ceremony after-parties. Enright, who bears a passing resemblance to actor Russell Crowe, had appeared with Tom Cruise in the movie "Knight and Day." He was guest starring as a bad guy on the television series "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." Since the 1980s he had been living the working actor's dream life in the entertainment capital of the world.
Yet, one day in 2015, in defiance of common sense and the tearful urgings of his friends, he decided to leave all that behind. Never having fired a gun at another human being, he embarked on an odyssey at the age of 51 that could have sprung straight from the imagination of a Hollywood scriptwriter.
His strange, sinuous meanderings have taken him on two harrowing tours of battle in Syria as a volunteer with the formerly U.S.-backed Kurdish militia. They also have thrust him into the byzantine pathways and switchbacks of the U.S. immigration system and, by his account, the wilds of international spy networks. His decision to overstay a U.S. tourist visa three decades ago and start a new life as an American has now made him unwelcome to come back to the only nation he considers home. So far, it hasn't mattered that he risked his life fighting an American enemy.
Because he fears returning to the United Kingdom, where some British volunteers with the Kurdish militia have been arrested and accused of consorting with terrorists, he finds himself, essentially, a man without a country. Unable to work, his money dwindling, he wanders, flopping for the past two years in slum apartments or couch-surfing in Belize and elsewhere in Latin America in the homes of people he meets in the streets or online. He hauls a thin pad to sleep on, a backpack, a handful of tank tops and shorts, and a clunky old laptop, hoping against hope that someone, anyone, will help him get back to Los Angeles.
Through more than two dozen interviews with his friends, fellow soldiers and others, as well as video and other documentation of Enright's battlefield exploits, The Washington Post has been able to confirm nearly every aspect of the actor's account. His saga has now captured the attention of Washington power players and veterans advocates who have been agitating to end Enright's exile and bring him home.
The details of his trajectory offer an unusually intimate glimpse into the forces that motivate men and women from around the world to throw themselves into conflicts not their own. Unlike mercenaries who flood into war zones for profit, Enright joined the fight for no pay, a throwback to the storied dramas of yore when the famed British writer George Orwell and others fought in the Spanish Civil War.
As Enright tells it, his war experiences were all about balancing an account. The ledger he holds in his head is particular to that of some successful immigrants - he says he wanted to repay America by helping to vanquish one of its terrorist enemies.
On screen, he'd often played the bad guy, leveraging his ability to shoot a menacing stare at the camera. In real-life, he yearned to be a good guy.
Enright envisions a final scene yet to be shot, one in which this master of small character roles steals the show by unlocking the secrets of a murderous, fanatical cabal: He's gathered intelligence about the Islamic State on the battlefields of Syria - computer memory cards, IDs, letters - that he hopes will unlock clues about the movements of the group in the Middle East and in the United States, he says. The improbable warrior/spy just needs the U.S. government to validate and value what he's found - enough to look past his immigration-law transgressions.
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