ISIS Is Gaining Territory, But The Kurds Still Have Iraq’s Most Experienced And Motivated Army
Jeremy Bender
BusinessInsider.com
Jun. 27, 2014
Over the past two weeks, the militant group ISIS has launched an almost unchallenged blitz across northern and central Iraq. Iraqi Army units vastly outnumber the jihadists and are far better armed than them — but for the most part Iraq’s uniformed military melted away after putting up only minimal resistance.
But ISIS fighters stopped when they reached the borders of autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan. They were facing an opponent that wasn’t going to back off from a fight: the Kurdish Peshmerga, Iraqi Kurdistan’s own highly trained and battle-hardened paramilitary force.
The Peshmerga, whose name translates as “those who face death,” number anywhere from 35,000 to 190,000 fighters, are unlikely to retreat before an ISIS assault — especially if they are defending what they see as their homeland.
The Peshmerga was first officially organized into a nationalist fighting force in 1943, although the idea of Peshmerga fighters existed prior to that, and the word referred to bands of Kurdish warriors and guerrilla fighters. From 1943 to the present day, the Peshmerga in Iraq fought a war in almost every decade in an attempt to create an independent Kurdish nation. In the 1990s, they waged a ferocious campaign against Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard, and effectively expelled the Iraqi military from several Kurdish sections of the country.
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