UK jihadis make this our problem too
LAST week I travelled to the land of my ancestors to visit the front line in a war for civilisation. I am the Tory MP for Stratford-on-Avon, but I was born a Kurd in Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad. My family fled in 1978 when my father, Hariths, discovered Saddam’s men were coming for him.
In those days, hardly anyone in the West had heard of Saddam.
Then, in 1988 he bombed the Kurdish city of Halabja with mustard gas. Suddenly, the whole world knew his name.
Today a new evil threatens the Kurds. The Islamic State’s (IS) methods may be less high-tech, but what’s truly frightening is that unlike Saddam’s army, these people are not afraid to die in their genocidal cause.
The autonomous Kurdish region of Northern Iraq shares a 600-mile frontier with the new ‘Caliphate’.
On Friday I travelled up to the front, to the Kurdish towns of Gwer and Makhmoor, where IS were recently pushed back by the Kurds.
IS were still close by. Through binoculars I was able to see them riding up and down in their pickup trucks, preparing for the next offensive. This warzone isn’t clearly delineated. The long front line is fluid and constantly shifting.
IS don’t fight like a conventional army, seeking to take and hold ground. Instead small units will rapidly surge forward – on Thursday last week they were just 20 minutes away from the Kurdish capital of Irbil – but will just as quickly melt away if they encounter resistance.
In a typical attack, IS will rush into towns with a wave of suicide bombers, then pound the area with shells and follow up with an organised ground assault.
But their primary weapon is fear. I heard many harrowing tales of beheadings, mutilations, women taken captive and passed around the jihadis. These terror tactics mean men of combat age are left with an agonising choice: do they flee with their families to protect them or do they stay and fight?
This isn’t just a bunch of unsophisticated thugs. IS have three main elements: battle-hardened fighters from Syria, ex-officers from Saddam’s army, and opportunistic Iraqi Sunnis who think they’re backing a winner and who don’t mind slaughtering the odd Christian in return for a good job in the new regime.
The first two groups certainly have the skills to make use of the weaponry captured from the Iraqi army. I heard that of the 900 Humvees they seized from the Iraqi army, 700 were in use.
The Kurdish armed forces, known locally as Peshmerga, are all that stand between IS and the ancient religious communities that have fled their advance. When I was in Irbil I saw old warriors, marching out of retirement and up to the front. I also met well-to-do Kurdish businessmen donning flak jackets and shouldering Kalashnikovs. These people don’t lack courage, but they need better equipment and training.
The Peshmerga are using secondhand Soviet weaponry to fight experienced killers armed to the teeth with latest American military kit. US air strikes are helping, but IS are learning all the time. They’ve started adopting smaller, looser formations. Once they seize a town air power is constrained as the US is reluctant to bomb civilian areas.
The message I bring back from Kurdistan is that this problem is not going away. Iraq is in for a long, hard battle with IS, and it’s our problem too. There are an estimated 500 to 700 British citizens fighting with IS.
A senior Kurdish leader reported to me that one dead jihadi was found with a Liverpool FC membership card in his wallet, another body was recovered with membership card for a gym in Ealing.
IAM not exaggerating when I say this is a war for civilisation. Kurdish society is everything we want the modern Middle East to be: tolerant, secular, democratic. The Kurdish Regional Government has accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees from Iraq and Syria without complaint.
And Kurdistan is already home to Yazidis, Baha’is and Christians who have lived for centuries in peace with their Muslim neighbours. If IS are allowed to destroy all that then what hope for this troubled region?
Head in the sand or boots on the ground is a false choice. Instead we in the West need to confront this problem with serious strategic planning. This means providing humanitarian assistance to the refugees and military support to the Kurds.
Yet even with enhanced military capability the Kurds cannot defeat IS on their own. We also need Iraq’s Sunni tribes to re-awaken and join the fight. They proved decisive in evicting Al Qaeda from Iraq, and can play a similar role with IS.
This war most certainly will not be over by Christmas. It will take the civilised world many years to win and it can’t be won with guns alone.
But if we lose, Christmas will never again be celebrated in the land of my birth.