KIRKUK, Kurdistan Region – After more than a year of fighting, it is clear that even after the Peshmerga secure victories and recapture territories, the Kurdish forces are still exposed to the wrath of the Islamic State.
This hard-learned fact was underscored again last week when a sweeping Peshmerga offensive through western Kirkuk province was stopped less than 20 km from the ISIS stronghold of Hawija by one of the jihadists’ most brutal and effective weapons: landmines.
“Our forces face death against the landmines,” said Dr Kemal Kerkuki, a Peshmerga commander on the frontline in west Kirkuk.
“ISIS makes them very complex and very dangerous.”
Mines are also a deadly factor in southeastern Kirkuk province, where nearly 6,000 of the explosives have been discovered. General Sirwan Barzani, commander of the Makhmour-Gwer front, said dozens of Peshmerga have died trying to diffuse the bombs.
In fact, Barzani estimates that landmines have caused 75 percent of the Peshmerga deaths on the frontline he holds against ISIS.
“They are our biggest problem,” Barzani said.
Since seizing large parts of Iraq and Syria last year, ISIS has become synonymous for asymmetrical battle tactics, such as car-bombs, suicide attacks and improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.
These strategies, which evoke fear in ISIS opponents and have slowed progress in the fighting, seem only to intensify as the group digs in and defends the areas under its control.
“ISIS is currently attacking our front with chemical weapons, mortars and gunfire,” said Kerkuki on Monday from a base a few kilometers from the front where several Peshmerga were killed in landmine explosions less than an hour before the interview.
The Peshmerga’s three-prong, 3,500-fighter offensive, their fourth major assault in western Kirkuk, had recaptured a string of villages as well as the strategic Ghara Heights and a stretch of the Kirkuk-Samarra highway. In all, 140 square kilometers had been taken back from ISIS.
Even so, Kerkuki was not resting easily. He said he had only a few minutes before he returned to the fight.
“We control the key to Hawija,” Kerkuki said, pointing to a projection screen that time-lapsed the Peshmerga’s progress against ISIS. “See, we have all the high places now, and ISIS just has the plains.”
The commander admits, however, that his men have been unable to safely navigate the no-man’s land because of the mines, IEDs and other intricate booby-traps built by the terrorists.
“In the last offensive, only one person was wounded by gunfire,” Kerkuki said. “The rest were injured or killed by landmines.”
Colonel Masoud Salih, a veteran Peshmerga officer and instructor at Zakho Military Academy, told Rudaw’s Zhelwan Z. Wali that ISIS had a high-functioning system in place to ensure that its troops have access to mines and other explosives.
“[ISIS] has powerful military engineers in the group's self-proclaimed capital of Raqqa in Syria. They have factories manufacturing booby traps and landmines in Raqqa, which are then distributed to their controlled areas in Iraq and Syria,” said Salih, 35, in a phone interview.
“Whenever there is an attack against them they ambush the forces, including the Peshmerga, the Iraqi Army and forces in Syria, with landmines,” he added.
Mines and explosives aren’t the only ISIS threats. During the interview, Kerkuki retrieved a bulky, white drone shot down by one of his fighters a few days earlier. A GoPro camera had been duct-taped to the nose of the device.
“We watched the video from the memory, and it revealed so much about our position and frontlines,” Kerkuki said.
In answer to how many ISIS drones have gathered intelligence on the Peshmerga and have not been shot down, the commander sighed and said, “Too many.”
He added that the lack of sophisticated demining equipment and skilled mine-removal engineers were hurting the Peshmerga.
“The landmines are slowing us down,” he said. “Until we can bring in teams to remove them, we have to wait.”
