Kurdish forces take on Islamic State in small, relentless battles for Iraq’s villages

KUBASHI, Iraq – Mortar rounds thundered over a barren landscape as Kurdish forces confronted fighters from the militant group Islamic State (IS) in a skirmish along the front line here Monday.

It was a small battle in a small war – a classic example of the kind of fighting that, even with US military air support, will take months if not longer to root out the Islamic militants.

The peshmerga, as the Kurdish forces allied with the US are called, explained that they are filling a void left by the Iraqi army when it collapsed over the summer, allowing the Islamic militants to sweep into and take control of a swath of land from Southern Syria to Northern Iraq.

The militants, also referred to as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria or ISIS, established what they refer to as a caliphate, and they’re now fighting to hold onto the string of cities and towns they rule with a fearful mix of barbarism and zealotry. The IS push has spurred an ongoing wave of hundreds of thousands of displaced people filling up UN camps that dot the roadsides here.

Commander Hussein Mansour, leader of a peshmerga brigade based in Khanaqin here in the southeast corner of Iraqi Kurdistan, began the morning filtering field reports about clashes between his forces and IS in the villages near Kubashi.

“This village is in between the Iraqi army and the peshmerga. This area has elements of al Qaeda and other terrorist elements that are supporting the Islamic State,” said Mansour.

He said he has requested US air power to assist in their operations against IS in the villages that skirt the Hamrin mountain range near the Iranian border. He expressed frustration with the failings of the US-trained Iraqi army, which he added have many officers who live in this area.

“The US needs to pay attention here,” he said, adding, “There is a network of terrorists that support the Islamic State and a community that appears to be welcoming them,” at least in the earliest days of the IS offensive over the summer.

Mobile artillery trucks move after clashes on the IS/Peshmerga frontline on the outskirts of Kubashi on Monday.(Tracey Shelton/GlobalPost) 

Updates crackled all morning over the hand-held radios of Mansour’s deputies. The reports indicated that three pickup trucks with heavy-caliber, mounted machine guns and flanked by motorcycle riders had led an assault, seriously wounding two of his fighters in Kanimasi. Then the fighters made an incursion into Sadya, he said, a small Kurdish hamlet in a valley outside Kubashi.

His field officers confirmed that the fighters were from IS, flying the group’s signature black flag, and that after several engagements they had pulled back. They said the militants were hiding in a concrete dwelling inside a hamlet known as Bany Wiis.

The field commanders were requesting Mansour send in a mobile artillery unit consisting of two trucks that carried heavy guns that could launch 57 mm mortar rounds at the dwelling, approximately 3 kilometers from a peshmerga post at Kubashi.

On Mansour’s orders, the mobile artillery unit began moving toward the trucks. A convoy barreled out of the base toward the post and arrived within 15 minutes to a front line position flanked by two tanks and several observation towers. The peshmerga said they also had intelligence on the ground in the tiny hamlet providing them with the fighters’ precise location.

The mobile artillery trucks moved into place and at first fired a single mortar close to the target, but missed by 100 yards. The cannons fired a succession of six more mortars, marching the rounds in closer to — and finally directly on — the target. The loud crunching sound of the mortars echoed through the dusty, windswept hills as they landed down in the hamlet.

Mahmoud Sangawy, a peshmerga field commander and leader of the political party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, emerged from the front line dusty and with binoculars around his neck. He confirmed the deaths of the militants and described the operation as a success.

But the question remained of how IS managed to dig into these villages. How did the group gather such surprising force in June, stunning most of the world when they took the Northern Iraqi city of Mosul and scores of other towns and villages in an area about the size of Maryland?

Echoing what Masoud Barzani, president of the regional government has said repeatedly, Sangawy explained that the peshmerga and Kurdish political leaders had for months prior to June warned the central government in Baghdad that the Islamic State was on the move.

“We told them and they didn’t listen. And, as we all now know, the Iraqi army did nothing. They ran away,” he said.

“So the peshmerga will stand and keep fighting, and keep pushing them back from our territory,” added Sangawy.

But after the mortar rounds were finished, there was no evidence of any further attempt by ground forces to move forward, and several of the peshmerga fighters standing around him seemed impatient with the decision not to go further.

Noor Abu Mageed, a machine gunner in an armored Humvee that idled outside the post, stood watching the mortar rounds land, saying, “That is my village they took. I am from Sadiya.”

He shared a video on his Samsung mobile phone shot by a resident of the town when the IS fighters took Sadiya over the summer, and the militants are seen celebrating the capture of the town just a few kilometers from the post and visible down in a valley.

He said, “We will get our town back with or without the US and with or without the Iraqi army. That is a Kurdish town. That is our town.”

More on GlobalPost: On Location Video: What the front-line fight against the Islamic State looks like