The town of Taza Khurmatu is about eight miles south of Kirkuk, in northern Iraq. Less than five months ago it was busy and thriving. Now it is eerily quiet.
At 2.30am on June 5 fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), in a large convoy of pickup trucks, shot their way through checkpoints and swept into Mosul, the main city in northern Iraq. By 2am on June 10 the Iraqi Army and the police force in Mosul – some 52,000 men in all – had been overrun. Mosul ‘fell like a plane without an engine,’ according to a local businessman.
Later that morning Isil fighters turned south, towards the city of Kirkuk. As Isil closed in, and one Iraqi town after another fell to the militants as far as Wadi al-Bashir, four miles south-west of Kirkuk, the inhabitants of Taza Khurmatu fled.
Today the town has a gaunt, abandoned look and an evil atmosphere of war. Land held by Isil is only a few miles away. Sentries look out across the empty plains from a string of watchtowers. Power lines have been cut to create a blackout against mortar attacks at night. There are no cars on the road, only military vehicles. Checkpoints are every few hundred yards.
The function of each is the same – to root out spies and suicide bombers. But each is manned by a different force – Kurdish Army; Iraqi Army; Shiite militias; Asayish (Kurdish security forces with black balaclavas covering their faces); local police – reflecting the fragmented nature of Iraq’s internal politics.
But it is the Kurdish army (its fighters are called peshmerga, or ‘those who face death’), soldiers from the semi-autonomous Kurdish area in the north of the country, that is leading the fight against Isil. It proved to be a more reliable force than the Iraqi army, whose soldiers, confronted by the threat of Isil, ran away. As the militants advanced on Mosul, they threw down their guns and stripped off their uniforms. Now it is the peshmerga who face Isil along a 650-mile front across north-eastern Iraq.
Originally guerrilla fighters (some still wear the traditional peshmerga uniform of baggy trousers and tunic held by a corset designed to support the back on mountain treks), they have a reputation for ferocity from fighting Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime in the 1980s, and throughout the region are viewed with patriotic devotio