Esmail and thousands of Kurdish peshmerga guerrillas like him–as many as 70,000–now form the backbone of the U.S. military campaign in the north. U.S. Special Operations Forces have been combing the region for weeks–poking around the front lines, pinpointing targets and liaising with Kurdish military commanders to facilitate operations, like the arrival of 1,000 paratroopers in a night drop within Kurdish territory last week. The first joint attack, targeting the Ansar enclave, kicked off last Friday. Nearly 6,000 peshmerga soldiers, broken up into offensive prongs, streamed toward Shinerwe Mountain at first light. Each peshmerga unit of 360 soldiers had two Special Forces liaisons to coordinate airstrikes. The Ansar bases had been “softened up” after a night of relentless bombardment by B-52s, F-14s, F-18s and cannon blasts from an AC-130. But the Ansar militants fought back and the peshmerga had to advance under fire. “The peshmerga move out with their rifle, a couple of magazines and a little bit of food,” says one Special Forces soldier based at Girde Drozna, a frontline hill overlooking Ansar territory. “They took off and covered six clicks in an hour. And they did all of that under fire. I’m extremely impressed.”
The peshmerga are equally impressed by the precise bombs that rain out of the sky and the electronic hardware that has transformed this front line of dirt bunkers and plastic sheets into a jumble of wires, satellite dishes and laptops. On the morning of the battle, most peshmerga craned their necks toward the sky to watch a buzzing remote-controlled drone with a four-foot wingspan that filmed the battlefield and fed back footage to direct the bomber planes. “This plane is unbelievable,” says Esmail, who has shared close quarters with the Special Forces soldiers at Girde Drozna. “I never knew such a thing could exist.” How precise were the attacks? “See that bunker there?” asks Hassan Kirkuki, 21, pointing to a pile of rubble overlooking a small village one kilometer away. “Nothing else around it was hit.”
The close cooperation between the U.S. Special Forces and the peshmerga has, despite the language barrier, led to a sense of camaraderie. Special Forces soldiers join the Kurds for a breakfast of yogurt and bread and reciprocate by giving out MREs (meals ready to eat). “The first day we saw this bag heating up food, we didn’t know what was happening,” says Esmail as his eyes light up in amusement. “Now we ask for it all the time. It’s much better than yogurt and bread.”
The tag team of Special Forces soldiers and peshmerga guerrillas will likely move south soon. The Kurds are ready for the fight. “Before we only had the mountains as our friends,” says PUK leader Jalal Talabani. “And now, thanks to God, we have the United States of America.”
