By Florian Neuhof
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Toufiq Ibrahim Hamaqan looks remarkably relaxed at the end of a day’s work.
Sitting outside a restaurant beside the road to Jalawla—the southernmost outpost of Peshmerga controlled territory—the 49-year-old calmly talks about his contribution to the Kurdish war effort: defusing improvised explosive devices.
Known by their acronym, IEDs have been planted by the Islamic State in thousands. Whether to slow the enemy's advance, or to inflict loss of morale and life by infiltrating enemy territory to plant their explosive traps, the jihadists rely heavily on what are in effect homemade mines. Hamaqan leads a unit of 18 men working to clear those deadly devices, which have been the biggest cause of casualties amongst the Peshmerga.
Six of the men are dedicated sappers, who perform the dangerous and nerve-wracking task of deactivating IED detonators or destroying the bombs in controlled explosions. The rest are support staff. They are often sent into the thick of it.
The team was part of the bloody battle of Jalawla in Diyala province, where the Peshmerga and a Shia militia unit managed to push out ISIS after three months of fighting in November. "ISIS was slipping into the Peshmerga's lines to plant IEDs. We had to be quick to defuse them," Hamaqan told Rudaw. Now entirely in Peshmerga hands, Jalawla shows how thinly stretched Kurdish resources are, he said.
He added that almost a year after the fighting, the town is still packed with IEDs. A sapper team was in Jalawla for a three-month period after its liberation, but months passed before IED clearing work restarted just recently. "It will take another six months to clear it. The war is active in all sectors, that's why we are busy and it takes a long time," Hamaqan said.
Clearing IEDs in urban environments is a tricky and time-consuming task, and it can take three hours to comb through a row of houses 100 meters long in search of explosives. If an IED is found, it takes around an hour to defuse. An elaborately booby-trapped house has to be entered from the roof or a second floor window, and magnifiers are used to detect trip wires "as thin as hair." The commander leads by example, and has by his own account defused around 150 IEDs and blown up a further 85.
He is no newcomer to the deadly world of mines, having been trained as a sapper in Saddam Hussein's army in 1985 and then serving in the Iran-Iraq war. He has since joined the Peshmerga, and is one of a small group of Kurdish mine-clearing veterans that are putting their military experience to use in the current conflict.
Hamaqan said that there are a total of 12 teams clearing IEDs active in the Kurdistan region, each consisting of around 20 to 30 men. Many of these units are headed by veterans of the Iraqi army like himself. Trained to clear conventional mines, experts like Hamaqan have had to adjust quickly to the asymmetrical warfare practiced by their opponents. Much like the Taliban in Afghanistan, ISIS has to improvise to make up for a shortage of sophisticated military technology. Its insurgent tactics rely on littering the ground in front of them with IEDs, which are produced en masse in specialized bomb-making factories. What ISIS lacks in sophistication it tries to compensate with ingenuity, and its factories pump out a wide array of constantly evolving bombs.
For Hamaqan, who is trained to defuse Cold War-era mines, this variation poses a deadly challenge, as he and his team have to grapple with new fuses and explosive charges. He has won out so far, but four of his men have been killed since Kurdish forces halted the Islamic State's northwards advance last year.
