ISIS Finds a Niche in Northern Iraq In a remote, mountainous buffer zone between Iraqi troops and Kurdish ones, the terror group digs in. By Jonathan Spyer
https://www.wsj.com/articles/isis-finds-a-niche-in-northern-iraq-1544053966
Makhmur District, Iraq
The Qara Chokh mountain range in northern Iraq is remote, parched and inhospitable. That’s what makes it attractive to the core of Islamic State, which has survived the four-year U.S.-led war against its caliphate. ISIS is now regrouping near here and in similar hard-to-reach corners of Iraq and Syria. The terror group isn’t finished.
“It’s more than 15 years that there is al Qaeda here,” says Lt. Col. Surood Barzanji, an officer of the Kurdish Peshmerga’s 14th Brigade, currently tasked by the Kurdish Regional Government with maintaining security in the mountain area. “They changed their name to Daesh”—the Arabic acronym for ISIS—“and now there is another one coming. A new one.” We look across the Hussein al-Ghazi Pass toward an imposing warren of caves where, he says, ISIS fighters are living. Two miles away, the first checkpoints of the Iraqi Security Forces are visible. In the no man’s land between Kurdish and Iraqi forces, Islamic State finds its niche.
Later, in a Peshmerga briefing room on the mountain, Col. Barzanji traces the route ISIS men use to reach their haven in the caves. It begins on the western side of the Tigris River, south of Mosul around the town of Hamam Alil. This region of Iraq is known to local residents, Peshmerga and Arab fighters alike as “Kandahar”—like the famously violent province of Afghanistan—because of the strength of support there for the Sunni jihadist cause.
“They cross the Tigris and they head southeast,” says Col. Barzanji, “passing through the villages here” via the Great Zab river and finally to the sanctuary of the Qara Chokh caves. “The villages along the way were Daesh supporters. One place, Tel al-Reem, there’s nine emirs”—commanders—“from Daesh that came from there. So the fighters pass through those areas and the villagers leave food for them. They come through on foot or on motorcycles.”
Once in the caves on the steep mountain, the fighters are relatively safe. Finding water is their main challenge. Iraqi forces have poisoned the one natural well, limiting the number of men able to live there.
Efforts to flush the jihadists out continue. Coalition aircraft strafed the mountain a day before our arrival, firing 12 rockets. Four ISIS members were killed and a pickup truck destroyed in another coalition airstrike here on Nov. 14. On Oct. 31, according to the coalition media office, some 20 ISIS fighters were killed on the mountain following airstrikes and a ground assault by Iraqi special-operations forces. But the jihadists remain, moving back and forth from the caves through the friendly villages and the countryside. In early November they set off an improvised explosive device near the mountain, killing four Iraqi federal policemen.
Qara Chokh is only one district in what some observers call ISIS’ “mountain state.” A recent report from the Institute for the Study of War found ISIS maintains similar networks of support and de facto control in the Hamrin Mountains in Diyala Province, the Hawija District, eastern Salah al-Din Province, Daquq and south of Mosul city—all in Iraq’s central Sunni heartland.
The report, entitled “ISIS’ Second Resurgence,” puts the number of fighters available to Islamic State in Iraq and Syria at 30,000. It also estimates that ISIS has smuggled as much as $400 million out of Iraq and invested it across the region. The terror group’s traditional revenue generators, including kidnapping, extortion and drug smuggling, still continue within Syria and Iraq. CONTINUE AT SITE
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