. . . Far from the battlefield, the war against Isis has entered the fabric of Iraq’s daily life. Sitting in his living room in Baghdad, Sergeant Mohaned Maared describes the moment he came close to death. He ran out of ammunition near the end of a 12-hour Isis assault on his position in Muqdadiya. He ran towards his Humvee to reload when the rocket-propelled grenade struck. He fell, briefly unconscious, to the ground. When he came to, he realised he’d been wounded in the head and thigh. An ambulance rushed him to Baghdad’s Medical City hospital. Luckily, the wounds were not life threatening but he looked a mess, with bandages round his skull. He called his brother-in-law, urging him not to let his wife and four children know yet that he had been injured.
When he finally arrived home, the youngest of his three daughters, Shams, aged three, began to cry. “She was terrified when she saw me,” Maared says, during a visit to the family’s home, a rented three-room edifice of breeze block in a shantytown on Baghdad’s northeastern edge.
The sergeant’s four children and his mother, Haifa Hassan, come into the well-kept sitting room. Soldiers serve 10 days at the base in Diyala and head home for 10 days, taking shared taxis and paying the $8 one-way fare out of their own pockets.
“When daddy leaves for the front, Shams gets sick,” says Shehed, his oldest daughter, aged 12. “She doesn’t sleep. She always cries.” In addition to her eldest, Mohaned, Hassan’s three other sons are serving in the army. “At night sometimes I cannot sleep,” she says over tea and cake. “I am afraid of the telephone ringing.”
The walls of the living room are adorned with Koranic sayings and portraits of the Shia saints, including Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, and Hussein, Ali’s son. “Is it enough to just hold up a banner that says ‘There is no god but God’ to make you a Muslim?” she says. “Does Islam behead, burn people, destroy homes, children, refugees?”
Anbar province remains the biggest puzzle for Iraqi security forces, and the site of the most bloody battles and decisive Isis victories. At a Baghdad hotel, Aamer Ibrahim Hazimawy, a 44-year-old who commands a unit of Sunni Awakening fighters — the paramilitary units set up by the US to defeat Isis in 2005 — tells me that last month he began deleting the names and numbers of his dead friends from his mobile phone. He counted 71 before he was overcome by despair and stopped scrolling.
He spends much of his life prowling the streets and protecting administrative buildings in the district of Khaldiyeh in Anbar’s capital Ramadi, just 100 metres from Isis. “Only the Euphrates separates us,” he says.
Hazimawy has made a rare trip to Baghdad after a perilous 125km journey through eastern Anbar province. Before battle, his men recite a Koranic verse: “And we have set a barrier before them and a barrier behind them, and have covered them over so that they cannot see”.
Armed with an AK-47, during the past several months he has led his men in ferocious street battles to aid the beleaguered army in keeping Isis fighters out of the provincial capital’s administrative centre. The vast desert province of Anbar is the one part of Iraq where Isis has been making some headway. Its distinctive black flag already flies in the city of Fallujah. In recent weeks it has gained a foothold in almost all the towns that run along the Euphrates, including Hit, Haditha, Rawa and Qaim. It has all but surrounded Ramadi, the provincial prize, pushing in from multiple directions.
“I don’t sleep that much,” says Hazimawy. “All night we walk and work. I sleep from 7am to 11.30am. For one year, that has been my daily schedule.”
Isis reserves a special scorn for the Awakening movement, even referring contemptuously to its Syrian Sunni enemies (who fight against the group as well as the regime of Bashar al-Assad) as sahwa, or awakening. In the months before it launched its June offensive, Isis made a point of targeting the leadership of the Awakening movement for assassination, perhaps recognising the threat it posed to its plans to establish roots throughout Sunni regions of Iraq.
Hazimawy has turned his home into a resistance safe house for the Khaldiyeh Awakening, where men can sleep, eat and plan out attacks and defences. Before he joined the movement in 2006, after the 2005 death of his tribal leader at the hands of Isis’s predecessor al-Qaeda in Iraq, Hazimawy sold cigarettes and exchanged money in central Ramadi.
The past decade has been a continuous war, frustrated by a Shia-dominated central government that has undermined their efforts by withholding pay and support, while allowing the rise of vicious sectarian militias that alienate Sunni and drive recruits to extremist groups such as Isis. Hazimawy is not married and has no children and, at some point, he stopped praying but most of his several hundred men are intensely pious.
“I am Muslim in identity, and everyone loves their religion,” he says. “Not all of Islam is Daesh.” . . . A small Sunni Awakening unit and men from the army’s 1st Division make up the hodgepodge of military units along the front in Amiriyat Fallujah. The volunteers under the command of Yasseri, the seminary student, wear badges depicting the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on their makeshift uniforms, which they or their families bought at army surplus shops.
“We are students, engineers, tradesman, doctors,” Yasseri explains. “After this is over, we will all go back.”
They arrived here on June 16, days after Ayatollah Sistani issued a fatwa calling for the creation of a volunteer force to defend the nation against the Isis menace. Many took the call as a religious obligation to engage in jihad, which can mean an armed or unarmed religiously infused struggle. God’s help only goes so far. Though they have successfully held the line, even earning the commendation of top officials, they have not taken any new territory in months. “We would need a large number of troops and air strikes to move forward,” Yasseri admits.
The enemy number in the hundreds, perhaps a couple of thousand, culled from the ranks of experienced Iraqi insurgent groups that fought the Americans for a decade and have now melded with Isis. Despite long stretches of calm, bouts of intense combat erupt. A week earlier, an Isis sniper killed the leader of Abbas’s unit. Two weeks ago, fighters from the nearby city of Isis-controlled Fallujah snuck across the buffer in a daring early morning raid that was ultimately repelled. Yasseri says the men’s faith keeps them strong. “It’s a global war,” he says. “We feel we are fighting Isis on behalf of the world, and we feel we have the real Islam behind us.”
Most of the time, Isis attacks with sniper fire or mortars but occasionally they launch early-morning raids across the buffer zone. “They came very close to us a few times,” says Arkan Hussein, the man with the PK machine gun. He’s a plump man with short hair and appears even younger than his 30 years. “When they fire on you and you’re in the fight, you don’t think about anything. You just fight.”
During one Isis ambush, a member of his team was killed. Hussein and others conducted their own raid, killing three of theirs in response, he says.
Occasionally, the Isis fighters turn on the megaphone and begin taunting the volunteers. “You are Safavids,” they scream, referring to the 16th-century Persian Safavid empire which broke off from the Sunni caliphate and embraced the Shia sect. “They try to insult us,” he says. “For sure they are infidels. Look at what they have done to the people of Iraq.”
Hussein pauses for a moment before continuing. “They have their own jihad,” he says. “We have our jihad.”