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Despatch: All that stood between us and jihadists were sandbags

 
Defence: Kurdish Peshmerga fighters holding their position against Islamic State fighters
Sebastian Meyer|Northern Iraq
19 September 2014

If he’d been American he’d have worn a cavalry hat and would have been chewing a cigar.

Instead he wore a black headscarf, baggy Kurdish shalwar trousers and chain smoked Marlboro 100s — up to four packs a day.

As he strode out to the front, General Waheed Govelli was the Kurdish version of Kilgore from Apocalypse Now.

He channeled all the toughness and invincibility of a man who’s spent his entire adult life fighting. When I asked about what it was like fighting Islamic State, one of his officers excitedly pulled out his phone to show me photos of dead jihadists that his general had killed.

Waheed had already lost interest and had one leg up on the sandbag wall which was all that stood between him and IS. I ducked down worried about snipers, but the general didn’t seem to care at all as he stood in an exaggerated lunge, chest puffed out, scanning enemy positions through his binoculars. As it turned out, I was the only one who was nervous.

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A few feet behind the sandbag wall, a group of Peshmerga were shooting a music video. A plump middle-aged man in fatigues danced and sang in front of a line of heavily armed soldiers. As he swayed to the beat and bleated an atonal version of a traditional Kurdish folksong, the men behind him shifted uncomfortably in the afternoon heat.

“Where are you from?” someone behind me asked. The scouse accent caught me by surprise and I turned around. A big soldier with a shaved head and an M-4 over his shoulder gave me a half grin. He told me his name was Hamid and he’d just returned to Kurdistan after spending eight years in Liverpool.

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He’d fallen in love with the place, he told me. How were the English? He paused, trying to find words that wouldn’t offend. “Well… there are some good ones and some bad ones. Like anywhere.”

“Have you had any training on that?” I asked, pointing at the American gun he was carrying. He shook his head, but he assured me that the TNT buried under a mound of dirt that covered the road between us and IS was all he needed for protection. He picked up two wires wrapped in electrical tape and tapped them together to show me how he’d set it off, if he needed to.

I gave him an apprehensive thumbs-up and decided it was time for me to drive home and file my material.

On the two-hour taxi ride back to Erbil I reflected on how much had changed in the region since I first came in 2008. Six years ago, when I began reporting in Iraq, Baghdad was the dangerous place, plagued by bombs, kidnappings and assassinations. Last year, I’d narrowly avoided being kidnapped myself near Haifa Street.

But this part of northern Iraq, which for the past ten years had been an oasis of calm, is now under attack by militants who behead people just like me. Today, all that stands between us are frontlines just like the one in Tel Isqof.

Just before I drifted off in the warm car, I thought about how strangely calm the frontline had been. I could see IS flags with my own eyes, yet everyone around seemed not to have a care in the world.

Later that night, while I was at my desk, I got a call from a friend who’d been with me at the front. A few hours after we had left, IS had mortared the Peshmerga positions. General Waheed was in hospital, he told me, and the officer who’d shown me the photos on his phone was dead.