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Disunified Front
The chaotic, underfunded battle against the Islamic State
Glass, Charles http://harpers.org/archive/2016/02/disunified-front/
Publisher: Harper's
Date Written: 01/02/2016
Year Published: 2016
Resource Type: Article
Journalist Charles Glass and photographer Don McCullin toured the Kurdish and Arab Shiite front lines that facing Islamic State Territory. In interviews with embattled leadership against ISIS, they discover an underfunded resistence, shortage of weapons and ultimately America's refusal to coordinate which has prolonged the fighting.
Abstract:
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Excerpt:
At the Swedish Specialist Hospital, in Erbil's largely Christian Ankawa quarter, we had met a thirty-one-year-old peshmerga named Halo Ramishtee, from northwestern Iran. Clean white bandages were wrapped around most of his torso and his legs, covering the wounds caused by shrapnel. He told us that he was a bomb-disposal expert who had trained with the Americans and held an international certificate of mine disposal. When the peshmerga took a village called Ghubaiba, southwest of Kirkuk, fromt the Islamic State, Ramishtee and his team went in to clear the explosives that were left behind.
"I had finished defusing the first one, and I stepped forward," he said. "I triggered a trip wire that set off an I.E.D." That cost him his left arm, which was severed at the elbow. "If I had special clothes, I would not have lost my arm." Before coming to Iraq, Ramishtee had fought with the Kurdistan Freedom Party of Iran against the government in Tehran. "I want you as an American to know me as a Kurd, not as an Iranian," he said. He was lying calmly on his bed with a tube near the stump of his upper arm that drained blood into a clear sack. "I came to defend my flag. Still I can give both my legs and my other hand to make my nation free." For him, as for many Kurds, the goal is independence for all of Kurdistan, not just the portion in Iraq.
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