GWER, Iraq—First you notice the sound of jet engines. The sky is overcast, so you can’t see the coalition warplanes. But you can hear them. And you know what the snarl of jet noise and the occasional thud of an airstrike symbolizes for the Islamic State fighters about a mile away.
With a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder and a curved dagger sheathed in his waist sash, peshmerga Col. Anwar Hassan watches his enemies through binoculars.
Hassan, 48, has been a Kurdish peshmerga soldier since the 1991 Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein’s regime, and he fought in the Iraqi Kurdish Civil War in the mid-1990s.
He also remembers the genocidal Al-Anfal campaign in the late 1980s when the Hussein regime killed about 180,000 Kurds through aerial bombardments, firing squads, and chemical warfare.
“Our only friends used to be the mountains,” Hassan says, amid the background din of jet noise and airstrikes. “Now we have America.”
Hassan commands more than 300 soldiers within peshmerga Unit 48. With about 1,000 total fighters, Unit 48 holds an 80-mile stretch of the front lines south of the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul in northern Iraq. The men under Hassan’s watch are spread along a 12-mile section of those lines, dug in on hilltops and in fortified compounds.
The peshmerga are a volunteer Kurdish fighting force, which represents an ancient warrior tradition dating back from before Alexander the Great. In Kurdish the word peshmerga roughly translates to “one who faces death.”
