ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Kurdish leaders say they now know who encouraged the Islamic State (ISIS) to begin attacks on the Kurdistan Region last summer.
“We know what ISIS’s agenda was, why they targeted Kurdistan and who sent them to Kurdistan,” said Ali Hussein, member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) leadership.
“And certainly the time will come when the people of Kurdistan will learn about it too,” he said.
Other high profile officials told Rudaw on condition of anonymity that Kurdistan Region President Massoud Barzani has also been informed about who and what drove ISIS to begin fighting Kurdish forces last August.
On several occasions last year, Barzani said that “others had pushed ISIS to turn towards Kurdistan,” without revealing further details.
Thousands of Peshmerga forces are now concentrated in the Gwer area, 60 KM west of Mosul, after hundreds of ISIS militants attacked the town last week in a surprise attack.
Hussein said that Gwer’s location is of extreme strategic importance to both the Kurdistan Region and ISIS.
“This place is close to Erbil and at the same time it is close to Mosul,” said Hussein, who is also a Peshmerga commander in the area. “It is as important to ISIS as it is to us. It (Gwer) is very close to Mosul, which is the ISIS capital of Iraq.”
Gwer briefly fell to ISIS militants last summer before it was recaptured by the Peshmerga ground troops with the support of American air strikes.
Peshmerga officials in the area say that in the Gwer region alone they have killed 400 ISIS militants in the last three months of fighting.
The area is strewn with destroyed ISIS vehicles, including a long-range artillery gun that posed the biggest threat to Erbil when the group attacked the region in August.
A Peshmerga fighter, standing only 300 meters from the last border with the Islamic State, said: “the war with ISIS is a vicious war.”
“But the Peshmerga are like a mountain and ISIS should learn not to bang their heads against the mountain,” he said.
The Kurdish forces share a 1,050 kilometer border with ISIS and fighting rages on a daily basis from Shingal to Makhmour in the west to southern Kirkuk.
“This the first frontline with ISIS,” said a Peshmerga, standing under a Kurdistan flag on a recently-dug mound marking the Kurdish border. “If ISIS crosses this line they will be able to reach anywhere,” he warned.
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