At Kurdish front-line outpost, skepticism abounds over assault on Mosul

Deliar Shouki, the commander of a string of Kurdish bases less than 20 miles from Mosul, admitted he was skeptical when he heard the news that a U.S. official said 25,000 Iraqi troops would attack the Islamic State-held city as soon as April.

“There really is no Iraqi army, so I don’t know where they get the idea that they can train 25,000 soldiers in two months to fight house to house in Mosul,” he said on a tour of his men’s positions on the outskirts of the tiny hamlet of Sultan Abdullah, about midway between Mosul and the Kurdish capital of Irbil.

Only a few hundred yards of open ground separates his troops from the Islamic State positions, with Shouki’s men dug in deeply on the tops of hills and the Islamic State fighters occupying the tiny village below. Nearly every night, the area is the scene World War I-style battles as the extremists attempt to storm the Kurdish trenches, only to be thrown back, with heavy casualties.

“It just seems to me like the Iraqi (Arabs) lack a certain morale to be soldiers, and I don’t want to directly accuse them of anything, but every time they fight Daesh, they lose ground and equipment that ends up being used against us,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “It’s very suspicious and I don’t think they want to fight them.”

Both Shouki and the American-made armored vehicle he uses to shuttle ammunition and evacuate the wounded from the front line are examples of how the Kurdish peshmerga adapted after the Islamic State stormed into Mosul and took over much of northern and central Iraq last summer.

Shouki retired from the Kurdish peshmerga after years of fighting Saddam Hussein. When he volunteered to return as Islamic State threatened, he was given command of one of the most bitterly contested sections of northern Iraq.

And his command vehicle once carried U.S. troops before being given to the Iraqi army when the Americans left in 2011. It was captured by Islamic State in June when the Iraqi Army abandoned its equipment and fled before the extremists’ advance. The peshmerga captured it in battle a few months ago and immediately put it to use.

“We need more armored vehicles and heavier weapons,” Shouki said. “We fight to defend Kurdistan and the coalition airstrikes have been very helpful, but we need (American) special forces’ ‘boots on the ground' to help guide them in and heavier weapons if we are to drive them out of Iraq.

“Americans need to understand we are fighting them here for you because if they stay in Mosul and take Irbil, they'll come to New York and Washington eventually.”

The commanders of this section of the front line dismiss the notion that any major operation led by the central government in Baghdad to recapture Mosul is imminent.

“The Arabs can’t take Tikrit and Bayji,” said one commander, referring to two much smaller cities held by Islamic State. “There is no Iraqi army, just Shiite militias.”

This story was originally published February 24, 2015 at 7:08 PM with the headline "At Kurdish front-line outpost, skepticism abounds over assault on Mosul."