Hollywood actor Michael Enright has become the latest westerner to join Kurdish forces battling the Islamic State (ISIS) jihadi group.

The UK-born Enright – who played minor roles in several box office hits including Pirates of the Caribbean – spoke to the United Arab Emirates’ Al-Aan TV from near the Syrian city of Hasake, where he has been fighting as part of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).

“ISIS… They need to be wiped off completely from the face of this earth. They are a stain on humanity,” Enright said in the interview, translated by MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute).

“This is not just a Kurdish call. This is a call to humanity to obliterate them,” he declared.

Enright told of his fondness for “Arabic people” and an interest in the Islamic religion, but said he was prompted to join Kurdish forces after seeing the atrocities committed by ISIS playing out in he media.

One catalyst was the beheading of an “American journalist” – presumably the first of two US journalists whose executions were filmed and distributed by the Islamist group, James Foley.

“An innocent man with his hands tied behind his back, and they cut his head off!”

“What  was even worse for me was that it was an Englishman who did it,” he added, referring to the British-accented masked executioner known as “Jihadi John,” whose identity was revealed as Kuwaiti-born UK national Mohammed Emwazi.

“I live in America. I feel such a debt to America. I love America with all my heart, and it was an Englishman who did it to an American citizen! And I just thought ‘Oh wow, I gotta try and help. I’m going to try and right that wrong,'” Enright recalled.

The second issue which drove him to fight ISIS was the jihadists’ attempted genocide of the Yazidi Kurds.

“Then I found out about the Yazidi people. I’d never heard of Yazidis before,” he said.

“I found out that they (ISIS) were killing the men and the boys, little boys, and turning their widows and their little girls, who were now fatherless, into rape victims. They were gang-raping them. That was just too much.”

“The straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said, was the burning alive of Jordanian pilot Mouaz Al Kasasbeh.

“That’s when I decided i was going to come.”

He explained that he decided to join the Kurds instead of Shia militias also fighting ISIS because “the Iraqi Shiites – they were like the French of the Middle East, they would just give up. They still are. They just keep surrendering… and giving all the weapons that American citizens had paid for over to the enemy.

“But the Kurds were not (like that). They were fighting, and I thought: I want to join them, because that’s my spirit. I didn’t come here to run I came here to fight – if I have to die I’m going to die.”

He said he wrote to his family as he knew he might never see them again.

Enright also shared some of his battlefield experiences, describing it as “like in a movie” – but said he “wasn’t thinking about” turning his experiences into a film.

“I haven’t thought about that at all. I’ve thought about killing them (ISIS).”