The article for those facing a pay wall:
The front-line fight against Isis Borzou Daragahi
Across Iraq, in harsh and dangerous conditions, thousands of Muslim men are risking their lives against the jihadi group
The red door is opening. The banter ends. The men have been observing the house for hours and finally there appears to be movement. Haider Muslim Abbas inhales deeply and stares into the scope of his rifle, aiming across the field. No more than 300 metres away, across an expanse of grass yellowed by the Anbar province winter, the fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, known as Isis, are hiding, likely keeping their own wary eyes on the front.
“Do it!” hisses his commander, a 39-year-old seminary student named Hamid Yasseri.
Abbas, a 35-year-old policeman from southern Iraq, grips the sniper rifle and releases his breath as he takes aim, exuding a steely calm. From a certain angle, he even looks a bit like Bradley Cooper — though this sniper is not American but an Iraqi, on the front lines of a war against a ferocious jihadi menace. He is described as the sharpest shooter among the fighters, his skills honed by hunting pheasant with his cousins and elders while growing up in the impoverished rural province of Samawa.
“I am here because I am afraid for my children,” he had said minutes before motion was detected on the other side of the no-man’s land. “I don’t want them to grow up in a world with Daesh [Isis]”. He has three kids back home, 280km to the south — daughters Fatma, aged four, and Raja, six months, and son Ali, two. He checks up on them when he can find mobile phone reception.
“I tell them that they’re terrorists, and they’re fighting us,” he says. “My daughter, when she sees a martyr coming from the front, she says to me, ‘Kill Daesh, because they are taking our uncles away.’”
Abbas shoots. The gunfire echoes across the valley, which is adjacent to the hamlet of Amiriyat Fallujah, about 60km due west of central Baghdad, and about 40km from the city’s western outskirts. Squinting, he fires again, and again. Then the mortar explosions begin to pick up.
“Get down!” the commander Yasseri orders, hustling a group of visitors out of the nest atop the one-storey house, to a safer position behind an earthen berm. But the mortar thuds increase, and grow louder, closer. The seminary student turned warrior, dressed in clerical clothes and holding an assault rifle, indicates that it’s time to beat a hasty retreat back to the base a few kilometres away.
In the west, the debate continues about whether Isis is an anomaly or a natural outgrowth of Koranic and other teachings — an integral part of Islamic ideas. Respected writers argue that the same impulse that gave rise to Muslim anger over depictions of the Prophet Mohammed gave rise to Isis.
But on the deadly front lines against Isis in Iraq and Syria, it is almost exclusively pious Muslim men — many with young families back home — who are standing up against the global jihadi group. Their harsh, dangerous lives present a poignant counterpoint to those who try to paint all of Islam with Isis’s bleak vision. Tens of thousands of Muslims like Abbas, some positioned within 100 metres of a terrifying group that burns alive or beheads its captives, risk their lives every day in the war against Isis.
“This is our war, too,” says Yasseri, the commander and cleric-in-training, an envoy of Iraq’s most esteemed Shia Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. “The same terrorists who are killing Iraqis are the ones killing the Europeans.”
To get to Amiriyat Fallujah from the capital, you drive due west on the international highway towards Jordan and then take a left into a network of rural and dirt roads. More than 2,500 men of the Ansar Marjaiyeh, or Soldiers of the Religious Leadership, belong to the volunteer unit. Half of them serve along this front in 20-day shifts, riding back home on the buses that bring up the other half. So far, two dozen have been killed and five dozen wounded, mostly by ingeniously placed booby-trap bombs. Men such as sniper Abbas work 12-hour daily shifts manning positions arrayed along the front line, mostly delineated by the network of canals that wend their way through the farmlands.
Despite promises, the government has only paid the volunteers’ salaries once in the past eight months. It even makes them come up with the $10,000 or so it takes to transport the men back and forth to their homes. This is despite the fact that they provide a crucial service by securing a position that protects flight paths to Baghdad’s international airport, which lies on the western fringe of the capital. Mosques and charities in the capital and the south take donations of aubergines, tomatoes, onions, beans and other foods to the volunteers, who cook them into vast pots of stew.
Arkan Hussein, a 30-year-old father of three from the southern city of Rumaitha, works the night shift at the same front-line position as Abbas. He goes to sleep about 7am after washing, praying and eating breakfast. Four or five hours later, he wakes up and struggles to find a signal to call his wife and kids, and his parents, who tried to discourage him from volunteering before conceding they could not stop him.
“I lie to my family,” he says. “I don’t tell them the dangerous things I do.”
The men take up residence in the homes abandoned by villagers here. They spend the off-hours watching news or sports on television, washing their clothes or helping prepare the collective meals before heading back to the front. Hussein, who worked odd jobs in Rumaitha before the war, heads to battle with a large Russian PK 7.62m machine gun he purchased himself, wrapping the belt of bullets around his neck, Rambo-style. I do this for my nation and the ahl al-beit [the holy family of the Prophet Mohammed]
Despite occasional news of battlefield losses, outside of Anbar province Iraq appears to be making incremental gains against Isis. Even in the areas where Isis retains a strong foothold, it has largely been contained. Politicians and diplomats have begun to speak about Iraq’s future after the group is neutralised, focusing attention again on perennial Iraqi problems such as the economy, and especially the growing power of the Shia militias fighting alongside the armed forces and under the cover of volunteer forces like Yasseri’s men. Shia militias have been accused not only of multiple atrocities, including summary executions of captives, but of preventing Sunni civilians who may have had nothing to do with Isis from returning to their homes, especially in religiously mixed areas around Baghdad. In one of Iraq’s latest victories, security forces rid much of Diyala province of Isis at the end of January, amid accusations of multiple rights abuses. . . .
Brigadier General Ali Hussein Shammari points across to the other edge of the Muqdadiya military base in northern Diyala province, along the main highway towards the Iranian border crossing about 100km northeast of Baghdad. Just beyond the sandbags, 600 metres away, is how close Isis fighters had come to the base, he says, practically taking up positions inside the drab facility once operated by US troops. They lobbed mortar shells and staged ambushes daily.
That was in the disastrous aftermath of June 10, when militants flooded across the Syrian border. They seized parts of the country’s north and northwest, including Mosul, as well as 30 per cent of this religiously and ethnically diverse province that abuts Iraq’s Kurdish enclave, Baghdad and a commercially important segment of the Iranian border.
According to independent accounts, the Baghdad government ordered Shammari to retreat. But he refused. Instead, over a gruelling seven months, the commander and the men of his 20th Battalion regrouped following the chaotic collapse of huge segments of the armed forces after Isis sacked Mosul. They went on the offensive, aided by powerful Shia militias and newly formed volunteer forces. Each morning, at dawn, the soldiers — some Sunni, some Shia — prayed to God to keep them safe, before heading to the various fronts in obscure towns such as Saadiyah and Jelola.
In the decisive and bloody 72-hour battle in Mansuriya in late January — marred by allegations of human rights abuses by Shia militias — Isis was pushed out of the last stretches of territory it controlled in the province, save for a sliver in the Hamreen mountains in the northwest.
“Diyala is now secure,” Shammari boasts. “There is no Isis. We kicked them out of all of Diyala.”
But victory or even containing Isis has come at a steep price. At least nine were killed from Battalion 20 alone and dozens more militiamen, interior ministry forces and volunteer fighters were killed in ambushes and improvised bomb explosions, along with at least 130 Isis militants. Shammari shows pictures on his smartphone of Diyala’s defenders lynched by Isis and its supporters, hung by their feet and burnt or beaten to death.