Standing on the roof of a village home east of the Tigris River on Monday morning was a Kurdish soldier in khaki uniform, a red beret and a Kalashnikov dangling around his neck. He was looking at columns of thick black smoke rising into the sky from the town of Qayyarah (Gayara) 60 kilometers from Mosul. ISIS militants had set oil wells and manmade pools of crude oil on fire in order to avoid air strikes. Strong winds bent the smoke a hundred meters above the ground and shrouded the whole area in a depressing blanket of dark clouds.
Iraqi soldiers were in the middle of an operation to take the village of Osaja on this side of the Tigris in the hope of making it to Qayyarah and from there on to Mosul. The sound of intense gunfire was carried to us by the winds like the celebratory fire of a distant wedding. In one corner of the rooftop two colonels were sitting on a torn mattress and quietly puffing cigarettes. I took their binoculars and searched until I found a row of tanks and armored vehicles rolling slowly like giant crabs into the ISIS territory.
There was dust everywhere. The sun glared mercilessly above our heads and the scorching winds felt like they escaped from a furnace. The soldier turned to me and said, “What kind of place is this? Even a donkey can’t live here.”
A moment later I heard the angry sound of the commander who was sitting on a plastic chair down below and shouting orders on the radio to soldiers on the front. “Go there right now or I’ll arrest you,” The young soldier leaned over the roof’s edge, looked at his commander and sighed, “He is just loud noise.”
This 28-year-old soldier had been in the Iraqi army for nine years and seen most of the fight against ISIS. He said the group’s biggest weapon were human shields. “In Nasr village in February we saw three young children, two boys and one girl,” he recalled. “As we approached them, they shouted, “Uncle, please don’t come near, we are booby-trapped. Seconds later the two boys were blown up but the girl survived.” In two years of fighting he had never seen an ISIS militant surrender voluntarily. “They only surrender when they run out of ammunition and have nothing left to fight or kill themselves with.”
He said most of the militants on this front were local Sunnis who severely punished anyone who had ever worked with the Iraqi government as in the village of Haj Ali. That was also why some of the soldiers and officers that day were from Haj Ali and were more determined than the rest of the army to kick out ISIS. It was payback day. A personal war between the people of the same village. As he was telling me about this, he used a Kurdish expression: “A tree would live a hundred years except for its homegrown worms.”
Qayyarah sits on a strategic location, connecting Mosul, Baghdad, Kirkuk and Erbil. It is home to an important airbase, a hospital, a power station and oil wells. The extremists are so deeply entrenched here that they sometimes get minutely information from inside the Iraqi army. They hold hostage soldiers’ families and blackmail them into spying or they have voluntary informants who share the same extremist ideology. “There is a lot of betrayal,” said the soldier on the roof. “We have caught soldiers passing on information to ISIS from inside our camp. We caught a militant and when his phone rang it was one of our own soldiers calling him.”
In this war of attrition and revenge the soldiers didn’t even bother to bury the dead militants, and left them to rot under the sun. “They’re so stinky that you won’t be able to eat for days,” said the Kurdish soldier. “I have lost weight from seeing too many dead bodies and not being able to eat.”
“In a village we found an old man with his flock of sheep,” he went on. “When he saw us he said take any sheep you want. Our officer told us to go ahead and they slaughtered a sheep and started barbequing. But I didn’t touch the meat. I felt bad. I knew that that man wouldn’t have made that offer if he hadn’t been afraid. I had also seen so many dead bodies that day that I had no appetite. So I just ate my bread with tea.”
After nearly an hour of watching the battle from the rooftop I got into the back of an army pickup truck and went towards Osaja but we stopped on a hill in its outskirts because we found out only then that the village was too dangerous to enter and not taken back as the soldiers claimed. Minutes after we stopped, the soldiers produced an ISIS flag out of nowhere and gathered for a photo-shoot for the army cameraman. Somehow I felt it wasn’t a flag taken in battle and that they might have brought it with them. ISIS flags are usually smaller, covered in dust and torn by the wind while this one was brand new, creased all over and shining in the sun fresh out of its plastic wrapping. Later on I asked two soldiers on two different locations about the flag. “It is all a show,” one of them told me. “Don’t believe it,” said the other.
When the photo-shoot was over the soldiers came together for a group dance of what they call ‘hosa’ in Iraq. They stomped the ground with their boots, totted their guns skyward and chanted slogans in their own praise. One of them got too excited and fired a couple celebratory volleys into the air, but their officer who was resting inside an air-conditioned badger vehicle poked out his head and shouted, “No, no, no. Don’t waste your bullets. If they are good, use them in battle.” The soldiers reluctantly obeyed the order, but a few seconds later a stronger and more dangerous order silenced them all. An ISIS sniper from inside a house in the village turned his rifle on them and dispersed them in every direction.
From the hilltop I got into a Humvee with some soldiers who had go to pick up a wounded comrade inside the village. The radioman kept asking for directions until he realized we were going the wrong way. We turned around with great care on the narrow tracks and went to another spot where we came to a halt next to several other Humvees. The soldiers were stuck inside their vehicles because ISIS snipers had pinned them down. The driver asked me and a couple other journalists to transfer to an armored badger. As soon as we stepped out the invisible ISIS sniper zoomed in on us. The badger was turning around to make sure the backdoor was not facing the sniper and we were moving along with it as it turned.
All the while bullets kept raining on us. At one point an Iraqi reporter standing next to me jumped up and looked at his foot. He reacted like someone who is prickled by a thorn or stung by an insect. But when I looked closer I saw that a sniper bullet had just gone through the hem of his pants. The next round was aimed at my legs bounced off the armored plate.
We couldn’t wait for the truck to fully turn around and started making it for the door for all we were worth. As I was climbing its iron steps a third bullet came at me, which I didn’t know until our cameraman showed me his film later. I saw that it had missed me by a few inches.
Once we were all safely inside the truck I looked around and saw that everyone, journalists and soldiers alike were pale from the near-death experience, especially the Iraqi reporter whose face already looked like that of a dead man.
The same badger vehicle then took me back to the original spot near the hill and from there a pickup truck that was going to bring food to the frontline from the main base gave me a ride back to Kabarul village where soldiers began asking me what was going on at the front. “Is it under control yet?” they asked me. “Did you see any militants? Are the Americans bombing them?” with these questions I felt our roles had reversed.
When I told them of the intense battle, the relentless sniper fire and the far-from-liberated river bank, one soldier from southern Iraq who was lying on the concrete floor and his shoulders resting against the wheels of a vehicle, shook his head in frustration and said the ISIS militants “Want to have lunch with the Prophet as if the Prophet has opened a restaurant.”
The soldier lying next to him, responded, “It is not an Islamic state. It is a booby-trapped state.”
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