#pesh merga

There is no question that these prisoners I am interviewing are committed to Islam; it is just their own brand of Islam, only distantly related to that of the Islamic State. Similarly, Western fighters traveling to the Islamic State are also deeply committed, but it’s to their own idea of jihad rather than one based on sound theological arguments or even evidence from the Qur’an. As Saltman said, “Recruitment [of ISIS] plays upon desires of adventure, activism, romance, power, belonging, along with spiritual fulfillment.” That is, Islam plays a part, but not necessarily in the rigid, Salafi form demanded by the leadership of the Islamic State.

More pertinent than Islamic theology is that there are other, much more convincing, explanations as to why they’ve fought for the side they did. At the end of the interview with the first prisoner we ask, “Do you have any questions for us?” For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his “question,” in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”

This whole experience has been very familiar indeed to Doug Stone, the American general on the receiving end of this diatribe. “He fits the absolutely typical profile,” Stone said afterward. “The average age of all the prisoners in Iraq when I was here was 27; they were married; they had two children; had got to sixth to eighth grade. He has exactly the same profile as 80 percent of the prisoners then…and his number-one complaint about the security and against all American forces was the exact same complaint from every single detainee.”

These boys came of age under the disastrous American occupation after 2003, in the chaotic and violent Arab part of Iraq, ruled by the viciously sectarian Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki. Growing up Sunni Arab was no fun. A later interviewee described his life growing up under American occupation: He couldn’t go out, he didn’t have a life, and he specifically mentioned that he didn’t have girlfriends. An Islamic State fighter’s biggest resentment was the lack of an adolescence. Another of the interviewees was displaced at the critical age of 13, when his family fled to Kirkuk from Diyala province at the height of Iraq’s sectarian civil war. They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe. This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.

An illustration of the less-than-total commitment to the cause of the Islamic State by Iraqis came from the Kurdish peshmerga Gen. Aziz Waysi, commander of the elite Zerevani (“Golden”) forces. He relates an overheard conversation between an ISIS fighter on the battleground and his leader, via a walkie-talkie previously confiscated from an ISIS corpse. “My brother is with me, but he is dead, and we are surrounded, we need help at least to take away my brother’s body,” General Waysi heard, and then the reply: “What else could you want? Your brother is in heaven and you are about to be.” This answer wasn’t what the poor surrounded young man was hoping for. “Please come and rescue me,” he said, “That heaven, I don’t want it.” But they didn’t, leaving him to whatever paradise awaited.

By Vivian Salama and Bram Janssen, AP, Feb 4, 2015

SINJAR, Iraq (AP)--As Kurdish fighters gathered around a fire in this damp, frigid mountain town in northwestern Iraq, exhausted from battling the Islamic State group, a surprising recruit wearing a tactical vest with the words “Christ is Lord” scribbled on it joined them.

The fighter, with a sniper rifle slung over his shoulder and Rambo-styled bandanna around his head, is 28-year-old Jordan Matson from Sturtevant, Wisconsin, a former U.S. Army soldier who joined the Kurds to fight the extremist group now holding a third of Iraq and neighboring Syria.

“I’m not going back until the fight is finished and ISIS is crippled,” Matson told The Associated Press, using an alternate acronym for the militant group. “I decided that if my government wasn’t going to do anything to help this country, especially Kurdish people who stood by us for 10 years and helped us out while we were in this country, then I was going to do something.”

Matson and dozens of other Westerners now fight with the Kurds, spurred on by Kurdish social media campaigners and a sense of duty many feel after Iraq, the target of a decade-long U.S.-led military campaign, collapsed under an Islamic State group offensive within days last summer. And while U.S. and its coalition allies bomb the extremists from the air, Kurds say they hope more Westerners will join them on the ground to fight.

Foreigners joining other people’s wars is nothing new, from the French Foreign Legion to the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War. The Kurds, however, turned to the Internet to find its warriors, creating a Facebook page called “The Lions of Rojava” with the stated mission of sending “terrorists to hell and save humanity.” The page also frequently features portraits of smiling, beautiful and heavily armed Kurdish female commanders and fighters.

Matson and three other Americans and an Australian national who spoke to the AP all said they arranged joining Kurdish forces through the Facebook page, run by the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, the main Syrian Kurdish militia fighting in northern Syria and Iraq. They crossed from Turkey into Syria, now in its fourth year of civil war, before later joining a Kurdish offensive sweeping into Iraq to challenge the Islamic State group. They now are based in Sinjar, whose stone homes painted green, pink and yellow have damaged in fighting, surrounded by sandbags and piles of rubble.

Foreigners like Matson seemed drawn to helping Kurds, Yazidis and other minority ethnic groups caught up in the battle, facing possible destruction at the hand of extremists willing to massacres hundreds in propaganda videos.

“How many people were sold into slavery or killed just for being part of a different ethnic group or religion?” he said. “That’s something I am willing to die to defend.”

However, the other Westerners who talked to the AP spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing the reaction of their families, who didn’t know where they were, or possible legal troubles if they make it back home.

So far, the U.S. hasn’t banned Americans from fighting with militias against the Islamic State group, though it considers the Turkey-based Kurdish Workers’ Party, commonly known as the PKK, a terrorist organization. The PKK has been fighting alongside the YPG in Sinjar and in the Syrian town of Kobani.

Under Australian law, it is illegal to fight with any force outside of its national army. Australia also is one of the first countries to criminalize travel to Syria’s al-Raqqa province, the de facto capital of the Islamic State group.

The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad had no immediate comment to an AP query about Americans fighting with the Kurds.

Matson and other foreigners fighting with the YPG came from Syria into Sinjar last month, which saw thousands of Yazidis flee into the surrounding mountains last year during the Islamic State group’s offensive. It’s unclear how many foreigners total are fighting with the YPG and other Kurdish forces, though both foreigners and Kurds say there are “dozens.”

There’s a clear comradery among the foreign fighters in Sinjar, most traveling in pairs around the town.

A number of YPG fighters, many of them as young as 17, joke and tease their new foreign friends, speaking to them in the local Kurdish dialect.

One fighter, 21-year-old Khalil Oysal from Syria, spends much of his time with the foreigners since he can speak English.

“We learn from them and they learn from us,” said Oysal, who American and Australian fighters have nicknamed “Bucky.” “They speak with us and they like to joke. They share with us many things.”

Western fighters in Sinjar say there is a major drive to recruit as many foreigners as possible, especially those with military training as many of young Kurdish fighters have little or no experience. The young fighters often pick up weapons and ammunition from dead Islamic State group militants. They also have no body armor.

Fighting remains dangerous for the Westerners as well. Two of the foreign fighters said they had just returned from visiting an American fighter badly wounded in battle. They said another foreign fighter, a Dutch national, was severely wounded in battle in Syria last week.

By Elena Becatoros, AP, Nov 1, 2014

MURSITPINAR, Turkey (AP)--Iraqi peshmerga fighters prepared Saturday to battle Islamic State group militants in the Syrian border town of Kobani, just hours after they arrived in a town that’s become a focal point in the battle against the extremists.

The force brought in badly needed heavy weapons including artillery, heavy machine guns and anti-tank missiles, material that could tip the balance of power in favor of the embattled Kurds fighting there.

Shorsh Hassan, a spokesman for the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, said the peshmerga and the YPG are preparing a role for Iraqi Kurdish troops. Hassan’s comments came after some 150 peshmerga fighters on Friday night entered Kobani to fight the extremist group that controls parts of the town.

“The priority will be to recapture Kobani neighborhoods that were taken by Daesh and then the goal is to liberate all villages in the countryside of Kobani,” Hassan said by telephone from Kobani, using an Arabic acronym to refer to the Islamic State group.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Saturday that the peshmerga force had yet to take part in any battles in Kobani.

Since mid-September, Islamic State group fighters have captured dozens of predominantly Kurdish villages near Kobani and entered the town they have been trying to capture for weeks. More than 200,000 people have fled to Turkey and more than 800 people have died, activists say.

By Greg Jaffe, Washington Post, September 5, 2014

AMERLI, Iraq--For weeks, Iraqi Kurdish fighters had joined an unusual alliance to free this dusty highway town besieged by Islamic State fighters. Shiite militias, Iranian trainers and U.S. military pilots had all contributed, finally wresting the city from the Sunni extremists and saving the 15,000 residents from starvation or brutal slayings.

But on Friday, as the Kurdish pesh merga fighters approached the city to greet the residents they helped save, they were treated less like liberators and more like intruders. “Pesh merga forces are not allowed to enter this city!” yelled a Shiite militiaman with Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi group. He waved his rifle at them and the pesh merga retreated.

“We fought for three months here, and now we have to fight these bastards,” said one of the pesh merga, who regard this area as part of their territory. “If this continues, we’ll have another war.”

The Obama administration’s strategy in Iraq is predicated on the country’s competing militia groups, as well as its battered army, setting aside their differences over territory, ethnicity and religion to form a grand coalition to battle the radical Sunni members of Islamic State. The aftermath of the fighting in Amerli shows how quickly this hodgepodge of militia forces can turn on each other as they fight for influence and the spoils of battle.

The road to Amerli also offers a glimpse of how the last few months of fighting have destroyed virtually every vestige of the Iraqi state in the north. After being turned away from Amerli, the pesh merga fighters returned to their base, just three miles away, passing through a half-dozen other Shiite militia checkpoints. Some belonged to the Badr Brigades, others to Saraya al-Salam and Asaib Ahl al-Haq. All were vying for influence in the area. Each flew their own militia flag; the Iraqi flag was nowhere to be seen.

The fractured landscape offered one sign after another of how difficult it would be for northern Iraq to return to the multiethnic, religiously mixed society it had once been.

On the side of the road near Amerli, lined up in a row, were the bodies of about a dozen Shiite men killed in June during the first wave of assaults by Islamic State insurgents in the area. The extremists killed hundreds of Shiites and members of ethnic minorities during their sweep through northern and western Iraq. Thousands more residents fled.

With the Islamic State fighters gone, it was finally safe for the local residents to exhume the mass graves. Friends and family members bent over the corpses searching for something--an identification card, a cellphone or a scrap of familiar clothing--that might identify their loved ones.

Ibrahim Kalif spotted what looked like a familiar T-shirt of his friend, a truck driver who regularly hauled bags of cement down the highway toward Baghdad. “I have seen him wearing these clothes,” Kalif said. “I’m sure it is him.”

A second mass grave, consisting of about 24 more bodies, was uncovered nearby, said a member of parliament from the area. Like Kalif’s friend, most of the dead were truck drivers, who were stopped by Islamic State fighters and killed.

On this day, Kalif was more interested in grieving for his lost friend than revenge. “We just want to live in peace,” he said, covering his nose with his sleeve to ward off the stomach-wrenching smell.

A few hundred yards away was the Sunni village of Suleiman Beg, once home to about 10,000 people and now completely abandoned. A handful of Shiite militia fighters ducked into the homes that had not been reduced to rubble in the fighting, looking for televisions, bicycles or jewelry they could steal. The pesh merga fighters posed for pictures in front of the building where the Islamic State fighters beheaded those accused of being spies or criminals. An unexploded artillery shell lay nose-down in what had been a carefully tended garden.

No one had any idea what would happen to the empty city. The pesh merga and Shiite militia fighters agreed that Sunni Arabs couldn’t be trusted to return. “If they come back, they will just plant bombs on the road,” said Capt. Wushar Harki, a pesh merga officer. “I would say that 90 percent of them are terrorists.”

The U.S. government has largely looked at the Kurds, who live in a semi-autonomous zone in northern Iraq, as a stabilizing force in the region. But the months of fighting are wearing on the pesh merga troops, who have begun to view everyone with distrust. The pesh merga forces--which are divided into two groups that report to the two major Kurdish parties--even suspect each other. Around Amerli, the pesh merga fighters complain that the best weapons from the U.S. government and Iran are going to Kurdish fighters associated with their rival party.

“We have not seen a single American bullet,” said Maj. Ahmed Mahmoud, the pesh merga commander near Amerli and Suleiman Beg.

The Sunnis and Shiites, meanwhile, say the Kurds are using the chaos to grab territory well beyond the Kurdistan region’s traditional borders with an eye to independence.

Amerli had seemed to represent the possibility of an alliance of different ethnic groups and formal militaries to defeat the extremists. The city is inhabited by thousands of Iraqi Turkmens, most of them Shiites who are of Turkic heritage, rather than Arab, like the majority of Iraqis.

The partnership between Iraqi troops, Shiite militias and Kurdish fighters--supported by U.S. airstrikes and NATO humanitarian air drops--would prove short lived.

By Azam Ahmed, NY Times, Sept. 1, 2014

ERBIL, Iraq--For decades, the pesh merga have enjoyed a fearsome reputation as unconquered mountain warriors, a storied band of guerrilla fighters who became the official guardians of the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq. But when fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria rolled into Kurdistan in August, the pesh merga fled the front line, just a half-hour’s drive from the territorial capital, Erbil.

Their collapse left tens of thousands of defenseless residents in ISIS’ path. And it shattered widespread hopes that the Kurdish forces might succeed in checking the militants’ advance where the Iraqi Army had failed, further calling into question fundamental assumptions about Iraq’s security.

Though the Kurdish forces have reclaimed much of the lost ground in the past two weeks, rallied by a campaign of American airstrikes, the initial losses prompted hard questions about how the pesh merga could have failed their greatest test in more than 20 years.

It has also set Kurdish officials scrambling to try to overcome years of internal political and military divisions to answer the threat and to secure more military assistance from the United States and Iran.

“Pesh merga” means “those who face death,” but in some respects, the biggest threat the pesh merga faced in the past decade was tedium, according to a range of interviews with Kurdish officials and security commanders. The Iraqi security forces, their bitter enemy under Saddam Hussein’s rule, nominally became their allies after the American invasion in 2003.

Many of the pesh merga’s battle-hardened veterans quit to take advantage of new opportunities amid a wave of economic development.

Training became an afterthought, and there was little incentive to unify pesh merga units that remained mostly divided along political party lines. Rather than answer to a central command, units took orders from their party, an arrangement that in 1996 had devolved into the Kurdish civil war.

“What happened now is teaching us that we cannot be just sitting down as if we don’t have enemies,” said Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff to the Kurdish president, Massoud Barzani. “Still, we need this resistance culture to defend what we reached, to defend the quiet life, to defend what we are going to build.”

“Otherwise they will destroy what we have,” he added.

Central to that reckoning is a realignment of the pesh merga. Last Tuesday, Mr. Barzani signed an amendment to create a more national army. Rather than having a force largely divided between their allegiance to two major parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, officials will integrate the units under the banner of the Ministry of the Pesh Merga.

Officials said consistent training would become the focus. Young men and women, whether they join the military or not, will be given some measure of military training, he said.

Still, many remain skeptical that the political will exists to upend a decades-old power structure.

As it stands, experts believe that each of the two parties fields more than 60,000 soldiers, while the ministry can claim just 50,000 in its own ranks.

“The vast bulk of the pesh merga are under the control of the individual political parties,” said Michael Knights, a researcher at the Washington Institute, who has specialized in the Kurdish forces.

Exact numbers of pesh merga fighters are a closely held secret in Kurdistan, but experts like Mr. Knights figure the total has swelled to about 175,000 since the ISIS assault began. Young and old have rushed to the battlefront, dusting off old weapons to assist in the defense of the Kurdish enclave.

But the young fighters have no battle experience. Many of the older pesh merga moved on, starting businesses and embracing the changing face of Kurdistan. And for those who remained, the pesh merga was practically a pension--steady pay for little work.

“We all began to reconstruct our country,” said Sirwan Barzani, a prominent businessman and relative of the Kurdish president, who rejoined the pesh merga to help after the ISIS encroachment. “It was another way to fight--to improve your country and make it nice.”

Now, he lives on a base near the town of Gwer, which the pesh merga retook in the initial wave of American airstrikes. Mr. Barzani said the pesh merga had been starved of resources from Baghdad, forced to pay for their own salaries and maintenance. With his personal money, he has furnished the pesh merga with cars, weapons and food.

As for the losses, Mr. Barzani echoed explanations given by other Kurdish officials: No one expected such a quick and decisive assault by ISIS, and the Kurdish fighters were also facing better-armed militants, with heavy weapons and vehicles claimed from the Iraqi soldiers they had overrun.

Mr. Barzani, who owns the Korek cellphone company as well as one of the biggest shopping malls in Erbil, bemoaned the more than 600-mile border that Kurdistan must defend now. The climate, too, has changed. The fight is no longer in the mountains, where the Kurds burnished their reputation.

“We know how to fight in the mountains,” Mr. Barzani said, sipping a Starbucks Frappuccino. “But this is the desert, and it’s so hot. It’s completely different.”

Calls for munitions heard in every corner of Kurdistan now appear to have been partly answered, according to Masrour Barzani, the top intelligence official in Kurdistan. The pesh merga have started receiving shipments of ammunition, machine guns and mortars, mostly made in Eastern Europe and therefore compatible with the systems used by the Kurds, he said.

Mr. Barzani said requests for heavy weapons had not been addressed, including Humvees and antitank weaponry.

Jumping in line to help arm the pesh merga are a battery of other nations, including Albania, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, France, Italy and Britain. Last Tuesday, Mr. Barzani said that the Iranians had also been supplying weapons to the Kurds, and in fact were the first nation to do so after ISIS militants started their march across Iraq.

As in the past, though, what remains to be seen is how long the pesh merga will be able to rely on the support of outsiders. Coupled with that uncertainty is the lack of clarity on how coordination with the Iraqis will go. Some officials say that Baghdad, despite pressure from the United States, has not been forthcoming with weapons or other military help.

The Times Sara Elizabeth Williams, in Irbil and Jerome Starkey in Baghdad

British aircraft flying over northern Iraq fed intelligence to the Kurdish peshmerga and Iraqi special forces as they fought to retake the Mosul dam, soldiers involved in the operation said.

A Kurdish colonel, who spoke anonymously, said that the information was relayed to a command post in Arbil, the largest city in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, and then on to the soldiers around Mosul.

The revelations came after Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, said that the RAF deployed Rivet Joint surveillance aircraft alongside Tornado bombers to monitor Islamic militants, who have captured huge areas of Iraq since their advance in June.

Soldiers from The 2nd Battalion The Yorkshire Regiment were also sent to Arbil, Mr Fallon said, on a short reconnaissance mission last week.