Peshmerga vs ISIS. An interview at the front-line.

[DetlefK]

http://www.cracked.com/feature/x-things-we-learned-talking-to-men-fighting-isis/

We kept hearing heavy machine gun fire chatter out at the Peshmerga positions, and the rumble of the airplane intensified. Then something exploded. The rifle fire stopped. But, my new friend explained, this didn't mean the air strike had killed anyone. ISIS has criss-crossed the area under their control with networks of tunnels. "When they hear the sound of the jets, they will just disappear."

In a movie, the bad guys' cannon fodder just pours across the field to be mowed down by the heroes. In real life, the enemy is smart; they adapt. We're the bad guys in their heroic quest.

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One major, speaking for a group of officers, said that what ISIS lacks in equipment, they more than make up for in murderous enthusiasm.

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ISIS paid a lot of attention to the fact that the U.S. spent roughly a decade killing Al Qaeda's "second in command" without stopping the organization. They've developed an organizational and leadership training structure robust enough to survive the death of any one military leader. While the air strikes around Mosul had killed an estimated 4,900 ISIS fighters in the last two years, the intelligence officer I spoke with didn't think targeted strikes against ISIS's leadership had been very useful:

"When some of them are killed, especially leaders, it doesn't really affect them very much. Because they are trying to die. Losing a leader is not very important for them. They can make any one of them a leader. One goal is, for example, to attack this line, I think they don't need a very good leader. They need some of them just to die."

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In 2014 the roughly 30,000 Iraqi Army soldiers garrisoning Mosul fled in the face of just 1,500 ISIS fighters. Despite a 15:1 numeric advantage and a whole pile of American weaponry, Mosul fell in six days. The vast majority of the Iraqi soldiers ran screaming into the distance rather than risk a beheading.

ISIS then seized several thousand humvees and tanks and turned their eyes to Kurdistan ... where they were stopped cold by this bunch of dudes with Kalashnikovs and not much else.





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"The weapons we are using now are the same weapons we used against Ba'ath armies ... Kalashnikovs mostly. The Peshmerga need vests, body armor. Vehicles. And they need good weapons they can fight with. Once they have these weapons, they can go anywhere they want. Because they have the morale to push ISIS out of Iraq."

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Vehicle-based IEDs (giant armored trucks filled with explosives) were the main threat to this section of the front.

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American airstrikes are great at blowing up VBIEDs, but those positions are so close to the enemy there that an armored killdozer would make it across much faster than a jet could even get airborne. So, the Peshmerga's best strategy right now is those aforementioned holes in the ground. Their frontline is criss-crossed by deep trenches, filled with razor-wire, that most vehicles can't cross without, say, the help of attached rockets and a ramp.

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Recently, an international watchdog organization reported that ISIS "may be" manufacturing their own chemical weapons. The Peshmerga we spoke with treated this as less of a "may be" and more of an "abso-fucking-lutely." As one Major explained to me in Makhmur, "They use a kind of rocket, katushas ... and they put chemical things in it. It's like white powder, phosphoric acid."

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They said they'd also had men get hit with rockets full of chlorine gas, a substance you may remember from World War One.

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Or like the other new weapons ISIS has begun to deploy: remote-controlled explosive vehicles. We were visiting the afternoon after a major assault by ISIS that involved multiple bulldozers and remote-controlled trucks rigged with explosives.

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They've also started using airborne drones -- not the Hellfire-launching Predator drones America has made famous, but smaller hobby-sized drones with cameras attached. They can't blow up a convoy, but can absolutely capture hi-def video of everything going on in the frontlines. Yes, thanks to the wonders of modern consumer technology, anyone can do aerial surveillance on the cheap.

ISIS has also earned notoriety on the Internet recently for their love of DIY armored vehicles. The capture of Mosul included a lot of armored- but unarmed- military vehicles that ISIS has essentially turned into enormous Mad Max-ian battlewagons:

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But when it comes time to do the real damage, nothing beats putting a live, suicidal Jihadist at the wheel. All they need to do is make sure they survive long enough to deliver the payload. Thus, here's what it looks like when ISIS gets their hands on a bulldozer:



Even filled with explosives, these things are well-armored enough to shrug off most conventional weapons. As one Peshmerga frontline officer told me, "Whenever they can't capture somewhere, they send vehicle based IEDs. While everyone's busy with the bomb, afterwards they attack the place."

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This, of course, is part of ISIS's sales pitch to young recruits. ISIS dedicated a prominent chunk of their 2014 documentary Flames of War to making the (short) life of a suicide bomber look super cool. They refer to it as, "the most effective weapon of war ever known." Then you see that their model suicide bomber looks like he should be in high school instead, and you get a horrifying new insight into just how ISIS works. General Afandi says that most ISIS fighters in general seemed to be "under 20."

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"In the frontlines, where there are some female Peshmerga. ISIS, if they could, would destroy that whole base," says a major at a frontline position in Makhmur. "It's really bothering them. If they hear there are female fighters on the peshmerga frontlines, they don't care about the danger in attacking. They want to behead all the females and the Peshmerga."

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" ... basically once they see a female and male fighting together, they really hate that idea ... they think there should not be communication, or any place with a group of female and males mixed ... they think that each of them has the right to have four women, and these kind of religious things."

There were no women on the sections of the frontline we visited, but General Hamid Afandi was more specific about how badly girls with guns scare ISIS. "There's a thinking that, if any ISIS soldier is killed by a women they will not go to paradise."

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So, now it's time for the main question on everybody's mind: is ISIS anywhere near a collapse? While everyone I spoke to agreed they weren't nearly as strong as they had been in 2014, one major pointed out that, "Still they are attacking our bases, and at the frontlines. For example yesterday they attacked the Iraqi army. If there were no airstrikes they could maybe control the whole area held by the Iraqi army."

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They admitted, "We were not expecting a large attack like this ... the more recent attacks were very powerful, they were massive and suicidal. They came with heavy armor ... and there were too many suicide bombers, suicide soldiers there."

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But the frontline officers I talked to the day after the attack were much less optimistic, "The recent attacks of ISIS showed that their army is getting more powerful ... their vehicles are heavily armored. It was really surprising for us also how quick they could get inside the frontlines."

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The real world is never so simple. Blaming Islam, and all Muslims, for ISIS ignores the fact that 90% of ISIS's victims have been Muslim. And likewise, virtually all the soldiers currently fighting and dying to stop ISIS are Muslims too. The vast majority of the Peshmerga practice Sunni Islam.

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Regardless, remember that the apocalyptic showdown between Islam and the West is the exact narrative ISIS is pushing. Every word from the West supporting that proposition plays right into their hands. They insist they represent true Islam in the same way Neo-Nazis insist they represent true white people.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

1. K&R. nt