Kurds plead for more weapons against ISIL

Sara Carter

American Media Institute

Iraqi autonomous Kurdish peshmerga forces and fighters from the Yazidi minority enter the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar, in the Nineveh Province.

SINJAR, Iraq — Kurdish fighters ousted Islamic State militants from this northern Iraqi city this month, but now they say they need more bullets and weapons to keep the extremists from returning.

Kurdish soldiers and the People’s Protection Unit fighters, mainly Kurds from Syria, helped liberate the city on the Syrian border on Nov. 13. The Kurds took control of the city after a U.S.-led coalition bombed several Islamic State targets.

“U.S. airstrikes were very helpful and they bombed all the ISIS points in a very effective way and made our task much easier and we thank them," Gen. Ali Hussein, a Kurdish special forces commander, said, using an acronym for the Islamic State.

But “we need all kinds of weapons from light to heavy artillery,” Peshmerga Gen. Shakr Hussein Hadj said. “Some of our weapons are so old they stop working in the middle of the fight.”

Former Yazidi resident Khalaf Halti, 62, walks through the rubble of his neighborhood in Sinjar, Iraq. Kurdish forces, with the aid of massive U.S. led coalition airstrikes, liberated the town from ISIL extremists, known in Arabic as Daesh, in recent days. Although many minority Yazidis celebrated the victory, their home city of Sinjar lay in almost complete ruins.

Looking through his binoculars on the front line, Heiko Seibolt, a German contractor who trains Kurdish fighters, known as Peshmerga, said “most of the (assault rifles) the Peshmerga are fighting with are antiquated” and many of the fighters don’t “even have night vision.”

During a visit to the front lines in September, Kurdish soldiers were seen carrying antiquated Russian AK-47 rifles older than they are. Grenades hanging from the commander’s waste belts were used sparingly because they are in short supply. A Dushka, the Russian-made heavy machine gun, sat on top of a Toyota 4X4 pickup truck. The soldiers said their weapons were unreliable – and often broken.

The Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq has complained that Iraqi’s central government in Baghdad has been slow to supply weapons to them and funds they are entitled to ever since the Islamic State invaded the country in 2014.

As a result, the Kurds are short of both weapons and the money to buy them.

The U.S. government is providing weapons in the fight against the militants but is insisting that they be distributed through Baghdad officials rather than directly to the Kurds and other groups to bolster the central government and prevent Iraq from fracturing intro ethnic and religious pieces.

Kurdish Peshmerga forces detain suspected ISIL members in Sinjar, Iraq.

“My men have been fighting in one of the hottest sectors with very little support from the international community,” complained Brigadier Gen. Sirwan Barzani.

He noted that the Islamic State was using mustard gas, yet his troops had received only 300 gas masks for 7,000 fighters.

The most reliable source of weapons, Gen. Ali Hussein said, is picking them up from dead Islamic State fighters. “The best equipment my Peshmerga have is what they captured from the terrorist organization,” he said.

American Media Institute is a non-profit investigative news organization. USA TODAY assisted in the editing of this story. Follow Carter on Twitter @SaraCarterDC.

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