Matthew Fisher
Opinion: After heavy fighting in north, peshmerga will be glad to see CF-18 Hornets
Ten kilometres from Islamic State front lines, in a dusty, impoverished Kurdish town where the marauding extremists had been expelled several weeks ago with help from U.S. warplanes, locals expressed gratitude Friday after it was confirmed that Canada was going to send six RCAF fighter-bombers to join the international air campaign against the jihadists.
“I know all about what Canada is doing. You had a government minister here recently and he made us some promises,” shopkeeper Behar Namiq said in an apparent reference to a visit to the Kurdish region two weeks ago by Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird.
“It was very good what the Americans did here before and it will be very good what the Canadians will soon do in Iraq.”
Hearing clashes as Islamic State fighters attacked the western outskirts of the town, Namiq said that he and every other adult male had fled into nearby hills, but only after urgently sending their women and children to the relative safety of the Kurdish capital of Irbil, which is about a 40-minute drive away.
“We had to leave. We were so nervous because everybody knew that Daesh had killed everyone they found in some towns,” Namiq said, referring to Islamic State by its Arabic acronym. “When we came back after the bombing we found that Daesh had done some terrible things such as killing dogs they had booby-trapped with bombs.
“Those people claim to be Muslims but they have no religion except killing. That is their belief.”
With Islamic State forces still close by, and equipped with artillery guns that can reach more than 20 kilometres, the tension remained palpable in Makhmur Friday. Every few hundred metres soldiers belonging to the Kurdish peshmerga or two other armed Kurdish militias manned guardposts and checkpoints on the roads while other fighters hid from the blazing sun under trees in compounds that were crowded with homemade fighting vehicles and guns.
“We still badly need more weapons,” said Lt. Gaylan Ahmed who was the officer of the watch at the main peshmerga base. “But even more than new weapons, we need people to train peshmerga how to use them because we have no previous experience of heavy weapons.”
Pointing around him, a grizzled and worn- out looking peshmerga fighter, still in dirtstained battlefield dress, said the fighting against Islamic State had been “very hard.”
The battered carcass of a 155 mm M777 towed artillery gun that had been struck by a U.S. missile had been given pride of place in front of the peshmerga base. Although many of Makhmur’s 10,000 residents had still not returned, the big howitzer was already something of a tourist attraction.
“The gun was given to the Iraqi army by the United States and fell into Daesh (IS) hands during the spring and now belongs to the peshmerga,” Ahmed said, explaining the unusual provenance of the weapon, which is also used by the Canadian Army.
Bullets from heavy machine guns pocked several nearby walls and houses, providing further evidence that there had been intense firefights in some parts of the town.
“We kicked Daesh’s ass up in the mountains first. The fighting down here was intense, too, but it only took one hour,” boasted Aslan Guany, a Turkish Kurd and militia member aligned with the Turkey-based Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), which is considered a terrorist organization by many western governments.
“It’s good to hear that Canada and other countries are coming here to fight on the Kurdish side even though we do not have direct links with them,” Guany said.
Amir Ali Ahmed, who runs a car parts shop, commended the PKK for joining the fight.
“They were really helpful to the peshmerga here,” Ahmed said before volunteering to show a video he had taken of the bloody bodies of seven Islamic State fighters who had been killed in the town. Better them than us, he said.
“If Daesh had had the chance they would have shot us dead in the street or captured us and cut our heads off.”
U.S. jets could be heard flying overhead every night, probably spying on IS fighters, Ahmed said. “But I have not heard them drop any bombs for about four nights now.”
Impatient to learn when the RCAF’s CF-18 Hornets might join the air war, Ahmed seemed disappointed when told that it might take several weeks for them to reach a nearby country where they would first run through a long list of safety checks before being declared operational.
The first Canadians to reach the Middle East will be a small advance party of engineers and logisticians. They will reconnoitre the airfields that the Canadian jets, surveillance aircraft and in-air refuelling tankers will fly out of. Those doing the “recce” are not expected to depart from home before the middle of next week. Maintainers and weapons specialists, as well as the “six pack” of supersonic jets and their pilots, will follow some days later.