A Report from the Front: Why the Peshmerga Need More from America
Peshmerga soldiers with Second Battalion, First Regional Guard Brigade. DVIDSHUB/Public domain
David Grange
My team and I are seven kilometers from the Mosul front line, in a peshmerga camp. We are drinking the inevitable never-ending cups of very strong, very sweet tea with the general, his officers, his men and an assortment of elderly peshmerga who have come out of retirement to voluntarily rejoin the fight. They are instantly recognizable by their baggy pants and turbans, compared to the younger soldiers in a variety of camouflage uniforms.
We’ve arrived during a lull. The fight for Mosul is tricky, because ISIS fighters can and do hide behind the civilian population. “Today is a good day for Daesh,” our hosts remark, with an eye to the sky; Daesh is their name for ISIS. That’s because it’s raining with heavy cloud cover, which obstructs air surveillance and targeting. Bad weather and ISIS, here in Iraq, get along well together.
We’ve brought several duffel bags stuffed with medical supplies including tourniquets and hemostatic bandages, and they form a circle around our medic, who will demonstrate their use. Our audience watches intently as David shows them how to put a tourniquet on an arm or leg, tighten it by pulling the strap, ratchet it even tighter, then feel for your pulse (if you can feel it, it’s not tight enough). Their gratitude for something as basic as tourniquets and products that will stop arterial bleeding is embarrassing to me as a former U.S. military officer. These are our staunchest allies in the fight against terrorism, yet we are leaving them high and dry. The peshmerga lack everything: tourniquets, medics, ambulances, properly supplied field clinics and, most importantly, life-saving frontline medical training. One of the soldiers timidly asks if we happen to have a knee brace; it’s harder to fight when you’re limping. We don’t—next time, we will. But the full extent of the shortages continues to come as a shock.
Source URL (retrieved on February 2, 2017):
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/report-the-front-why-the-peshmerga-need-more-america-19278
