The Will to Fight: What Psychology Reveals About Kurdish Fighters

The Will to Fight, Combat Psychology and Kurdistan

Modern militaries measure almost everything. They model supply chains, simulate battlefields, calculate firepower ratios and track satellite intelligence in real time. Yet for all the sophistication of contemporary warfare, one decisive variable continues to resist precise measurement: belief.

Again and again, conflicts demonstrate that material superiority does not guarantee victory. Entire armies collapse unexpectedly, while smaller and less equipped forces endure under extraordinary pressure. From Mosul in 2014 to Kobane months later, the war against ISIS exposed this paradox with particular clarity. It raised an enduring question that military planners, historians and psychologists alike continue to confront: what determines whether soldiers stand and fight — or break and run?

In recent years, cognitive anthropologist Scott Atran and his collaborators have attempted to answer that question through frontline fieldwork conducted during the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Their research focused not primarily on tactics or weaponry, but on what they described as the “will to fight”: the psychological commitment that sustains combatants under extreme conditions. What they found was striking. Across multiple armed groups, battlefield endurance appeared to depend less on material capability than on moral conviction — and nowhere was this more evident than among Kurdish fighters.

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What Is the “Will to Fight”?

To understand the significance of these findings, it is necessary first to understand what scholars mean by the will to fight. Historically, military thinkers have long recognised the importance of morale, cohesion and belief. Clausewitz famously described war as a contest of wills, and twentieth-century research on combat motivation repeatedly showed that soldiers fight less for abstract political goals than for their comrades and immediate social bonds. Yet modern military analysis often privileges quantifiable factors — logistics, training, technology — over the less tangible psychological dimensions of conflict.

Atran’s work builds on a growing body of research in political psychology and anthropology that attempts to bridge this gap. Central to his framework is the concept of the “devoted actor”: individuals who are motivated by sacred values and fused identities rather than by instrumental reasoning. Sacred values differ fundamentally from material interests. They are experienced as non-negotiable moral imperatives — commitments that cannot be traded for money, safety or even survival. Identity fusion, meanwhile, describes an intense alignment between personal identity and group identity, such that threats to the group are experienced as threats to the self.

Together, these dynamics help explain why some individuals are willing to endure extreme suffering for a cause while others are not. The devoted actor framework suggests that once sacred values and fused identities take hold, conventional cost-benefit calculations lose their relevance. Fighters no longer weigh risks against rewards in rational terms; instead, they act according to moral obligation.

Inside the Study: How Atran Measured Commitment

The study itself unfolded under conditions rarely available to academic researchers. During the height of the ISIS conflict, Atran and his team conducted structured interviews with a wide cross-section of combatants across Iraq and Syria. These included captured ISIS fighters, Iraqi army personnel, Sunni tribal militias and Kurdish combatants drawn from the Peshmerga, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Syrian Kurdish YPG.

Rather than relying on informal conversations alone, the researchers used a series of structured psychological assessments designed to evaluate commitment systematically. Fighters were asked to rank their most important values — family, religion, nation, honour or cause — and to consider hypothetical scenarios involving imprisonment, torture or death. They were asked what they would sacrifice for those values, whether they would accept harm to their families for the cause and how they perceived their own strength compared with that of their enemies.

These questions were designed not simply to gather opinions but to reveal underlying moral frameworks. Across groups, the responses varied considerably. Many Iraqi soldiers expressed uncertainty about leadership and distrust toward institutions. Sunni militia fighters often described more pragmatic motivations tied to local security concerns. ISIS fighters consistently framed their struggle in religious terms. Yet Kurdish fighters repeatedly articulated their motivations in ways that stood apart from all other respondents.

What the Study Found

For many Kurdish interviewees, the defence of Kurdistan was framed not as a political objective but as an existential necessity. Fighters spoke in terms of memory, language and collective survival, describing their cause as inseparable from their identity. In Atran’s later analysis, this constellation of commitments was sometimes referred to as “Kurdeity”: a synthesis of homeland, culture and moral duty experienced as sacred rather than strategic.

The results suggested that Kurdish fighters demonstrated unusually high levels of both sacred value commitment and identity fusion. In structured scenarios involving extreme sacrifice, they frequently indicated willingness to endure imprisonment, torture or death and often prioritised collective survival over personal or familial welfare. Equally notable was their consistent emphasis on what they described as spiritual strength over material power, reflecting a moral rather than technical conception of warfare.

Battlefield Reality: When Psychology Became Strategy

These findings also appeared to align with battlefield outcomes. When ISIS advanced rapidly across northern Iraq in 2014, several Iraqi army divisions collapsed with surprising speed, abandoning positions and equipment. Kurdish forces, by contrast, quickly reorganised defensive lines and maintained cohesion under pressure. They played decisive roles in halting ISIS advances toward Erbil, defending Kurdish-majority regions and supporting coalition operations across Iraq and Syria.

The siege of Kobane became one of the most visible demonstrations of this dynamic. Kurdish YPG and YPJ fighters defended the city against sustained ISIS assault, often in close urban combat. Although coalition airpower played a critical role, observers widely noted the determination and resilience of Kurdish ground forces, who maintained defensive positions under conditions that might have broken less cohesive units.

Military analysts frequently highlighted organisational features that reinforced this resilience. Kurdish units were often described as disciplined yet adaptable, combining relatively decentralised command structures with strong ideological cohesion. Their fighters demonstrated flexibility across both urban and guerrilla environments, and their morale appeared unusually durable even during prolonged engagements.

Beyond Combat: Kurdish Resistance as Cultural Survival

Beyond immediate battlefield outcomes, these patterns also reflected broader historical and cultural dynamics. The Kurdish population — estimated at between thirty and forty million people across Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria — remains one of the largest stateless groups in the world. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Kurdish aspirations for statehood were sidelined by the geopolitical arrangements that shaped the modern Middle East. Over subsequent decades, Kurdish communities experienced varying forms of repression, assimilation policies and displacement across multiple states.

From a psychological perspective, such conditions may reinforce precisely the forms of collective identity and moral commitment identified in Atran’s research. Cultural practices, language preservation and commemorative traditions often function as forms of resistance that sustain group cohesion under pressure. Rather than existing apart from political struggle, these elements frequently constitute its emotional and symbolic foundation.

The Impact of the Will to Fight on the Psychology of War

Taken together, Atran’s findings suggest that the will to fight remains one of the most decisive yet least understood variables in modern conflict. While material power continues to shape outcomes, psychological commitment often determines whether forces endure or collapse under stress. For analysts and policymakers alike, this poses an enduring challenge: belief cannot be easily measured, predicted or countered through conventional means.

The broader implication is not that psychology replaces strategy, but that it underpins it. Wars are fought not only with weapons and plans but with identities, values and narratives that give those instruments meaning. In the end, the war against ISIS reaffirmed a lesson as old as warfare itself: sometimes the most decisive factor is also the hardest to quantify — how deeply a people believe their survival depends on victory.

References

• Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists by Scott Atran (2010)
  https://www.harpercollins.com/products/talking-to-the-enemy-scott-atran
• Devoted Actors Sacrifice for Close Comrades and Sacred Cause by Scott Atran, Ángel Gómez, and Hammad Sheikh (PNAS, 2014)
  https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1416287111
• The Devoted Actor’s Will to Fight and the Spiritual Dimension of Human Conflict by Scott Atran et al. (Nature Human Behaviour, 2017)
  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0193-3
• The Devoted Actor: Unconditional Commitment and Intractable Conflict Across Cultures by Ángel Gómez et al. (Current Anthropology, 2017)
  https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/691000
• The Evolution of Extreme Self-Sacrifice by Harvey Whitehouse et al. (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2017)
  https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/evolution-of-extreme-selfsacrifice/3F4C9A6EEC5B5F2E6A6E57F7EBCB7B3C
• Desertion and Collective Action in Civil Wars by Theodore McLauchlin (International Studies Quarterly, 2010)
  https://academic.oup.com/isq/article/54/4/1163/1787443
• Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador by Elisabeth Jean Wood (2003)
  https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/insurgent-collective-action-and-civil-war-in-el-salvador/9A1F8A7F6D0F6C5E3C5F8D9C7B9B5A2E
• The Kurdish Quasi-State: Development and Dependency in Post-Gulf War Iraq by Denise Natali (2010)
  https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/1883/the-kurdish-quasi-state/
• The Kurds: A Modern History by Michael M. Gunter (2016)
  https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691156825/the-kurds
• Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence by Aliza Marcus (2007)
  https://nyupress.org/9780814757113/blood-and-belief/

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