On a plateau near Wardak village there was the sound of gunfire. When minutes later I got to the spot I saw the bodies of three dead Islamic State (ISIS) militants. They had clearly been killed in an intense battle as their bodies were riddled with bullets.
A short distance away there was a group of Peshmerga soldiers and as I listened I realized they were speaking Arabic. They had captured some ISIS militants alive.
I walked towards them and saw they were giving water to the captured militant and shaking the dust off his hair and clothes. They were also telling him, “Go and persuade your friend to surrender, too,”
We were standing near a deep tunnel. Six militants had hid inside it. Three of them were killed by Peshmerga fire and two crawled out and handed themselves over after the Peshmerga threw a burning tire into the hole. The third militant known as Abu Yassin had stayed inside and refused to surrender.
Ahmad Ibrahim and Ali, the two captives went inside the tunnel a few times and tried to talk their commander to surrender, but he threatened to kill them if they asked him one more time.
“Abu Yassin says he will not surrender. He has five hand grenades, a fully loaded Kalashnikov and a pistol and he will fight to the death,” Ibrahim said as he came out of the tunnel for the last time.
At this point the Peshmerga called in an excavator and decided to dig up the tunnel. It was a 30-meter-long tunnel in a zigzag shape. A couple times during this process Abu Yassin came out and opened fire on the Peshmerga and threw his hand grenades. Some Peshmerga were wounded in the exchange, but they eventually managed to kill him.
Ibrahim said he was 16 years old. He said ISIS had severe shortage of fighters. “I was in the traffic police in Mosul and they came to me and said we need you for just two days. They didn’t tell me what it was for or where. That is how I came here and this is the first time I see a fight. I was posted in Gazana village but when it fell to the Peshmerga we came inside this tunnel.”
Ibrahim then said ISIS had told him, “The Peshmerga were infidels and apostates and had to be fought and if you die in that war you are a martyr and will go straight to paradise.”
He talked as if he did not believe in it himself or perhaps changed his mind after his capture. He was wearing a black t-shirt and army pants. He was married and said that only his mother knew he was there fighting.
The other militant, Ali was 17 years old and he hailed from a residential area in Mosul. Their commander himself had fled and when I asked him why he did not escape, too, he replied, “Because we were ordered not to leave,”
A Peshmerga officer added his own point, saying, “It is not that they fight on principle, but because even if they fled from the Peshmerga, ISIS itself would have killed them,”
“I have been with ISIS for seven months and my monthly pay is 60,000 dinars (approx. $53) and a canister of cooking gas,” said Ali.
“ISIS told us that it is true the Peshmerga are Muslims but they are renegades because they do not live by the Sharia law and therefore must be fought,” he said, as he stood there surrounded by his captors.
At that moment a Peshmerga soldier recited the Islamic Shahada of there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger and I asked the captive militant what he thought. He replied, “Now he is a Muslim,”
As Ali and Ibrahim finished their stories and taken away, a Peshmerga commander told me, “Bringing traffic policemen to battle shows that ISIS does not have enough fighters anymore because the battlefront has now widened in Syria, Iraq, and south and west of Kurdistan.”
On the Khazir Front ISIS had deployed 200 suicide bombers but most of them were killed by coalition airstrikes and Peshmerga fire.
Colonel Younis Muhammad of the Peshmerga said to me, “An ISIS militant was killed and as I was inspecting his corpse his cell phone rang. It was his wife calling. When I answered she said, ‘Where is Abu Musab?’ I said he is dead. And she said, ‘no, he is in paradise,’ and I said, ‘No, he is actually lying dead in front of me,”
Another day, as Col. Muhamad was standing over another dead ISIS militant, his phone rang and this time it was the father calling. “I answered the phone and he said, ‘where’s my son?’ and when I told him he was dead, he replied, ‘My son was very bad and never listened to me. He got what he deserved,’”
Comments
Rudaw moderates all comments submitted on our website. We welcome comments which are relevant to the article and encourage further discussion about the issues that matter to you. We also welcome constructive criticism about Rudaw.
To be approved for publication, however, your comments must meet our community guidelines.
We will not tolerate the following: profanity, threats, personal attacks, vulgarity, abuse (such as sexism, racism, homophobia or xenophobia), or commercial or personal promotion.
Comments that do not meet our guidelines will be rejected. Comments are not edited – they are either approved or rejected.
Post a comment