ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Peshmerga leaders have been turning away foreign volunteers eager to fight against the Islamic State, explaining the Kurdish military needs weapons, not manpower.
Citing reasons ranging from safety to diplomatic relations, Peshmerga officials say the practice of putting foreigners on the frontline is just not done. For one thing, as Ministry of Peshmerga spokesman Helgurd Hekmat explained, it’s illegal.
“The Peshmerga is a professional fighting force,” Hekmat said, adding that Kurdish law expressly forbids admission of foreigners to the iconic fighting force whose name means “those who face death.”
Still, Hekmat said he routinely turns away wide-eyed Westerners drawn to put their lives on the line in the name of fighting ISIS, and adventure.
“Just last week an American man arrived wanting to volunteer. I couldn't help him. Yes, they are volunteers, but we have to guarantee their lives and we can't do that,” he said.
In the past, some Westerners have seen action, but Kurdish authorities appear to be discouraging foreigners from coming to join the fight.
In December, Rudaw interviewed Canadian Dillon Hillier about his experiences fighting alongside Peshmerga against ISIS at al-Wared, near Kirkuk. At the time, Hillier told Rudaw he intended to stay for a year.
Instead, Hillier and an American who fought with him left in January, with the 26-year-old telling Canadian media that US military advisors pressured Peshmerga commanders to take the volunteers off the frontline.
“I wasn’t going to sit in the rear doing security,” Hillier told Canada's National Post. “That’s not why I went there. So we decided to head out.”
The well-publicized military exploits of Hillier, a veteran of the Canadian military and son of a politician, made him a minor celebrity in his homeland, earning the moniker “Canadian Peshmerga.”
Yet Hekmat said it has always been Peshmerga policy not to allow volunteers on the front lines. He denied that pressure from American advisors had influenced the decision.
He added that it was not a lack of troops that was hindering the fight against the Islamic State.
“We do not have enough military support for the Peshmerga to make progress,” he said, reiterating a common complaint of Kurdish authorities: the Peshmerga need more heavy weapons, and they need the arms sent directly, instead of routed through the central government in Baghdad, which Erbil accuses of delaying deliveries or not sending the weapons at all.
A North American group set up to help volunteers like Hillier come to fight in Kurdistan said it would now focus on offering training services to the Peshmerga.
Canadian former serviceman Ian Bradbury, who registered an NGO called the First North American Expeditionary Force, said there was still a need for “technical and institutional development” in the Peshmerga.
“The influx of individual, uncoordinated, fighter volunteers does not address this need,” Bradbury said. He added that it, “in some cases complicates scenarios by diverting precious manpower and resources towards ensuring the protection of those individuals.”
The turning away of foreign volunteer fighters in Iraqi Kurdistan is likely to cause more Western volunteers to join units in Syria.
“The situation is different in Syria and Rojava. The YPG is not a disciplined army,” Hekmat said, referring to an ethnic Kurdish region of northern Syria and the People’s Defense Units, or YPG, the armed wing of Syria’s Kurdish Democratic Union Party .
A Facebook group called Lions of Rojava helps foreigners join up with the YPG.
An American who had fought with the YPG in Rojava said there were currently about 25 foreign fighters in the Kurdish region of Syria. The man, who asked to remain anonymous, said he was returning to the US but that many more volunteers continued to arrive.
The Peshmerga are still internally divided between the rival Kurdistan Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and there are reported to be Western volunteers still fighting alongside PUK units near Kirkuk.
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