Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Grateful for the Help fighting ISIS, the Kurds Hope for Better Training and Equipment to Do a Better Job

Ten kilometres from Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham front lines, in a dusty, impoverished Kurdish town where the marauding extremists had been expelled several weeks ago with help from U.S. warplanes, locals expressed immense gratitude Friday after it was confirmed that Canada was going to send six RCAF fighter-bombers to join the international air campaign against the jihadists.
Six Canadian CF-18s like these, seen in Lithuania t
his summer, will deploy to the Middle East
“I know all about what Canada is doing. You had a government minister here recently and he made us some promises,” shopkeeper Behar Namiq said in an apparent reference to a visit to the Kurdish region two weeks ago by John Baird, the minister of foreign affairs.
“It was very good what the Americans did here before and it will be very good what the Canadians will soon do in Iraq.”
[...]
A Kurdish Peshmerga fighter holds a position at a frontline
on Sept. 13, 2014 in Baqrt, 10 km south of the Iraqi city of
Makhmur
“We still badly need more weapons,” said Lt. Gaylan Ahmed, who was the officer of the watch at the main peshmerga base. “But even more than new weapons, we need people to train peshmerga how to use them because we have no previous experience of heavy weapons.”
Pointing around him, a grizzled and worn-out looking peshmerga fighter, still in dirt-stained battlefield dress, said the fighting against ISIS had been “very hard.”
The battered carcass of a 155 mm M777 towed artillery gun that had been struck by a U.S. missile had been given pride of place in front of the peshmerga base. Although many of Makhmur’s 10,000 residents had still not returned, the big howitzer was already something of a tourist attraction.
“The gun was given to the Iraqi army by the United States and fell into Daesh [ISIS] hands during the spring and now belongs to the peshmerga,” Lt. Ahmed said, explaining the unusual provenance of the weapon, which is also used by the Canadian army.
Bullets from heavy machine guns pocked several nearby walls and houses, providing further evidence that there had been intense firefights in some parts of the town.
“We kicked Daesh’s ass up in the mountains first. The fighting down here was intense, too, but it only took one hour,” boasted Aslan Guany, a Turkish Kurd and militia member aligned with the Turkey-based Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), which is considered a terrorist organization by many western governments.
“It’s good to hear that Canada and other countries are coming here to fight on the Kurdish side even though we do not have direct links with them,” Mr. Guany said.
Read the full story HERE.

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