Do SGs Still Have Homeland to Fight For Like the Kurds if FAPTraitors Not VTO in 2016

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Horrors of War Haunt Kurds as Weapons Trickle Into Erbil By Donna Abu-Nasr Oct 20, 2014 9:18 PM GMT+0800 9 Comments Email Print <a href="javascript<b></b>:void(0)">Speed

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Photographer: JM Lopez/AFP via Getty Images Kurdish Peshmerga fighters hold a position during fighting against Islamic State (IS) militans in Rashad, on the road between Kirkuk and Tikrit, on Sept. 11, 2014. Close

Kurdish Peshmerga fighters hold a position during fighting against Islamic State (IS)... Read More


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Open Photographer: JM Lopez/AFP via Getty Images Kurdish Peshmerga fighters hold a position during fighting against Islamic State (IS) militans in Rashad, on the road between Kirkuk and Tikrit, on Sept. 11, 2014.







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• Kurds Defend Against ISIL

After two months on the front line holding off the onslaught of Islamic State, Peshmerga fighter Ari Harsin says one incident will haunt him forever.

Two of his comrades in their 20s volunteered to defuse a bomb before the Kurdish military unit could advance and recover the Iraqi village of Hasan Shah, which had fallen to the extremist group. It was a trap. The militants, freshly trained and better-equipped, detonated it remotely.

“We had to gather their bodies in pieces and send them to their mothers,” Harsin, 50, said in an interview in the Kurdish city of Erbil while on a week’s leave from the front, taking a sip of water to steady his voice.

The U.S. and European allies, including Britain, France and Germany, were quick to commit to helping the Kurds after Islamic State captured several villages and towns around Kurdistan. Yet more than three months later and the Peshmerga fighters being relied upon to hold off the jihadists on the ground say they are still using mostly antiquated, Soviet-era weapons while the new supplies of heavy machine guns trickle in through Baghdad.

Related: U.S. Drop Weapons as Turkey Allows Iraq Kurds Into Kobani

The Kurds received some weapons, including anti-tank missiles from Germany, though the flow isn’t keeping up with the pace of the battles, Mostafa Said Qader, minister of Peshmerga affairs, said in an interview at his office in Erbil.
Photographer: Donna Abu-Nasr/Bloomberg EDITOR'S NOTE: BEST QUALITY AVAILABLE. Peshmerga fighter, Ari Harsin, speaks during an interview at the press center inside Kurdistan's Parliament building in Erbil, the Kurdistan region of Iraq, on Sunday, Oct. 12, 2014. Like many civilian Kurds, Harsin, a lawmaker in the Kurdish parliament in Erbil, took up arms to defend the semi-autonomous area in northern Iraq. Close

Peshmerga fighter, Ari Harsin, speaks during an interview at the press center inside... Read More


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Open Photographer: Donna Abu-Nasr/Bloomberg EDITOR'S NOTE: BEST QUALITY AVAILABLE. Peshmerga fighter, Ari Harsin, speaks during an interview at the press center inside Kurdistan's Parliament building in Erbil, the Kurdistan region of Iraq, on Sunday, Oct. 12, 2014. Like many civilian Kurds, Harsin, a lawmaker in the Kurdish parliament in Erbil, took up arms to defend the semi-autonomous area in northern Iraq.





The U.K. Ministry of Defence said last week it so far delivered 300 tons of weapons and equipment from supporting countries to Erbil, while a British military team is training the Peshmerga on the operation of 40 heavy machine guns.
Fire and Blood

While the Peshmerga have benefited from the shipments and morale is high, “what’s been sent is a tiny percentage of what we need,” Qader said.

Like many civilian Kurds, Harsin, a lawmaker in the Kurdish parliament in Erbil, took up arms to defend the semi-autonomous area in northern Iraq. In an Iraq struggling with violence since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, the city has been an oasis of stability and prosperity, its economy buoyed by a construction boom and oil from wells controlled by the Kurds.


Harsin said he’s now spending most of his time on the border that divides the Kurdish region from the rest of Iraq. Like many Peshmerga, he started fighting as a teenager before taking up a civilian job.
“My father was also Peshmerga and I grew up with war, with fire and blood and patriotism in my family,” he said.
Effective Force

To date, the Peshmerga have been the most successful military force in combating Islamic State, said Rick Brennan, a senior political scientist at Rand Corporation, a group specializing in security research.
The Sunni Muslim militant group swept through areas in Iraq in June and July, linking up with territory it controls in Syria to form its extremist caliphate.

Al-Qaeda's Heirs

Kurds in Syria have for weeks been defending their city of Kobani. The fall of that stronghold would extend Islamic State’s effective border with NATO member Turkey to more than 100 kilometers (63 miles). Properly arming and training the Kurds is crucial in the fight against the jihadists, said Brennan.

The U.S. military said this week it dropped weapons, ammunition and medical supplies to Kurdish forces defending Kobani for the first time. They came from Kurdish authorities in Iraq and were dispatched by three U.S. C-130 aircraft, according to the U.S. Central Command.

“If you’re going to stabilize Iraq, the place to first make certain that you’ve got control of the situation is northern Iraq,” said Brennan, who served as senior adviser to the U.S. military in Baghdad from 2006 to 2011. “If you give up Erbil, you give up the rest of Iraq.”
Protecting Erbil

Two months after it took over the Iraqi city of Mosul, Islamic State came close to entering Erbil in August after trying to breach the key post of Khazir.

The militants were 30 minutes away from the city and their progress down the bumpy highway flanked by small villages was only stopped by U.S. airstrikes, said Rosch Shaways, a Peshmerga commander who is also Iraq’s deputy prime minister. Getting new hardware is vital to recover other areas lost, he said.

“We need new weapons, we need machine guns, artillery, armored vehicles, mine detection and removal equipment and helicopters,” he said.
Any arms shipment must be approved by Baghdad, where planeloads of weapons are searched before being sent north up to Kurdistan, said Qader, the minister.
German Rifles

Some weapons that have arrived were deemed useless by the Peshmerga against a well-armed opponent, Shaways, 66, said at the command post at Khazir. He said one consignment of arms from Germany contained rifles that were too heavy.

“It’s better not to use them,” he joked, sitting in front of military maps hanging in his office about 10 kilometers from an Islamic State base in Mosul plain.

Some 100,000 Peshmerga fighters are on the front and that number could multiply if needed and, crucially, if weapons were available, said Shaways. Qader put the total number of the Peshmerga force at 160,000 and said retired personnel have volunteered to bolster the defense.

“I used to fight for my homeland and for my own people, now it’s also for humanity,” said Shaways.
Saddam Attacks

Iraqi Kurdistan first gained autonomous status in an agreement with the Iraqi government in the 1970s, and its status was re-confirmed within the federal Iraqi republic in 2005. The Kurds were suppressed under the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who carried out campaigns to eradicate them, including a poison gas attack in Halabja that killed thousands.

After Saddam’s fall in 2003, the U.S. trained the Iraqi army. Only a handful of Kurdish units were given U.S. equipment because the government of then Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was afraid the Kurds would become strong enough to stand up against Iraqi security forces, Brennan at Rand said.

Islamic State’s advances, including the Peshmerga’s inability to protect the minority Yazidi population, was an embarrassment to Kurdish officials, said Dlawer Ala’Aldeen, president of the Middle East Research Institute in Erbil.
It was a wake-up call that the Peshmerga forces “need to be institutionalized, they were poorly equipped and that the Islamic State’s new capability was beyond the Kurdish ability to control,” Ala’Aldeen said.
Harsin said the foes he encountered on the battleground were better trained than he had expected, their skills boosted by the advanced U.S. weapons they captured.

Islamic State militants also typically send suicide bombers to open up fronts that are tough to penetrate, booby trap anything they can find to stall the enemy, including refrigerators, and position snipers on rooftops, he said.
That said, Harsin isn’t worried about dying at the hands of the extremists like his comrades defusing the bomb.

“I’m 50 years old, I had a great young time,” he said. “I am married three times. I have three nice kids and three grandchildren. This is for me the meaning of life, to be in service of the Kurdish people and Kurdistan.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Donna Abu-Nasr in Erbil at [email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alaa Shahine at [email protected] Rodney Jefferson


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