Only sleeping

Brigadier General Hajar Ismail, director of coordination and relations at the Ministry of Peshmerga, talks to Gwyn Winfield about preparing for Daesh’s re-awakening

While many areas in Iraq can lay claim to having been targeted with chemical weapons, few have experienced more attacks than the Kurds. First through the Saddam regime, and then during the ravages of Daesh, the Kurdistan region has suffered the use of a range of chemical weapons1. The most recent experiences started in 2015, when Daesh began to attack using vehicle borne improvised explosive devices with chlorine payloads. As is often the case when new weapons are introduced to a conflict, response was improvised, but, through April 2015, when Daesh first deployed improvised chemical mortars the Kurdish CW response to these attacks was more synchronized and expeditious.

Most deployments of Chemical weapons were small, isolated attacks, but on occasion, as at Taza2, there were sustained bombardments causing hundreds of casualties. Had Daesh ever managed to step up the toxicity ladder to nerve agents, there seems little doubt that the fatalities would have been in the thousands, as happened in Halabjah in 19883 .

National and international CBRN support began arriving in for the Kurdish region from 2015. Limited quantities of PPE and detectors were welcome, but there was never enough to allow the Kurds to adequately protect their citizens and forces from Daesh’s the imminent threat of mustard and chlorine attacks. To assist in the fight, the Kurdistan Training Coordination Centre (KTCC), was stood up in 2014 with eight countries helping to train the peshmerga. This is the fourth time I have interviewed Brig Gen Hajar Ismail, the first time being in 2016 when they stood up a chemical protection company and laboratory. In addition to this they needed to provide generalist CBRN training to the police and peshmerga forces, a total of approximately 20,000 individuals.

The threats that the Kurdish CBRN forces have to face are not

The security situation in the north resulted in widespread destruction ©DoD

just CBRN, but also toxic industrial chemicals. Another touchstone of memory is al Mishraq4 chemical plant which contains thousands of tonnes of sulphur. While this is outside Kurdish territory, a plume released there had previously affected Kurdish citizens negatively, even though it was only activated as a screen against allied bombing; and when Daesh dug in around Mosul, there was the concern that the same thing would happen again. Unlike the Saddam era release, this time it was a more limited exposure, and a combination of Iraqi CBRN forces and firefighters managed to contain the plant. In addition, Daesh also released and burnt a great deal of black oil to act as an obscurant. There is a suggestion that along with the oil they included mustard and this was confirmed by US forces5. All of this has left Brig Gen Ismail very aware of the threat that chemicals are to his region.

“The peshmerga CBRN unit is a new unit in the ministry of peshmerga, but very important to have so that we can protect our forces and civilians. This was especially necessary when ISIS started using gas against us in 2015 and ’16. We built a new unit, small at first but now growing. Currently it is a CBRN company, and command is centralised so it is controlled by the ministry of peshmerga based in Erbil, the centre of the Kurdistan region.

“Instead of just one company we plan to have a CBRN regiment with enhanced capacity. We are grateful to the US and Germany for opening training courses for our CBRN soldiers, and many of them have attended courses in Germany and the US. Some training was done by the DoD and some by the state department. Sandia Labs, for example, received funds from the state department, and opened joint training courses for peshmerga and Iraqi ministry of defence CBRN, both inside and outside the country. We also received some good equipment from Germany and the US. The goal is not just to have a CBRN laboratory, but to have all the skills and equipment necessary to face our CBRN enemies.”

The laboratory is a work in progress, and the peshmerga have also received training on using the lab from the Germany and the United States. This will allow them confirmatory analysis of what their handheld detectors tell them in the field and means that they don’t need to reach back to other allies and lose valuable time. What has been a success for them is the

Mosul, thanks to unexploded ordnance and abandoned arms dumps, has become a highly dangerous place for the population ©DoD

KTCC, this has four training centres in the Kurdistan region: Bnaslawa training centre, Atrush training centre, Sulaymanyia training centre, and in Manila training centre6. Before Covid shut them down, the centres had trained 40,000 peshmerga in a variety of skills, including train the trainer in CBRN.

The plan was to include greater oversight and monitoring of the KTCC, but even before Covid hit the coalition decided to have three operations central advisory teams7. One of these is OCAT North, and this is in Erbil. As Brig Gen Ismail explained: “These are providing advice and monitoring the training of the peshmerga forces. They will also look for the gaps that we have within the ministry of peshmerga in order to provide more logistical support to the peshmerga. So we won't have KTCC any more, we will have OCAT North.

Though Daesh doesn’t hold any physical ground in Iraq, it is not dead, it is just sleeping. Brig Gen Ismail is keen to point out that the ideology is the threat, it provides a siren song to elements of the Sunni population and former Ba’ath party members. In addition, there are the various foreign fighters, or at least the ones that haven’t escaped to continue the fight in Libya or elsewhere. Returning good governance to the ruined areas of Iraq will take a long time, and in the interim there is fertile ground for recruitment and caches of weapons, explosives and potentially chemicals for the recruits to use. Daesh is the latest incarnation that started with Al Qaeda in Iraq, and there is every expectation that a new variant will be just as unpleasant - Brig Gen Ismail uses the word ‘evil’ - as the last. It will take a strong unified government to defeat Daesh, and that is likely to take a generation8 .

Brig Gen Ismail explained: “We always say Daesh are defeated but not destroyed. They still exist and are active in some areas like Kirkuk, Hamreen, Makhmoor, Diyala, and the disputed territories. We used to have a joint security mechanism between the ministry of peshmerga and Iraqi ministry of defence, but we don’t have that now. Instead, there’s dialogue and negotiations with the Iraqi army and support from the coalition forces in the disputed territories. We are working to rebuild or restart the joint security mission, joint checkpoints, joint forces, and joint operations against Daesh. Right now we have a Kurdistan defence line and an Iraqi defence line, and in some places there is a big gap, hence the disputed territories. ISIS takes advantage of this gap, which can be 5-40 km wide, and uses this vacuum to grow. ISIS remains a threat, and whenever they are a threat so are chemical weapons against the Kurdish and Iraqi people.

“In the past ISIS had their own terrorist caliphate, when they controlled major cities and large areas in Syria and Iraq. Now they are forced back into attacking as small terrorist groups, like guerrilla warfare. They lost their leaders, with many of them killed, particularly Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, but they remain a threat, not only in Iraq but also Syria. The border between the two countries is not fully controlled, so they can easily slip between the two.”

The coalition is still very active in helping the Iraq military forces and the peshmerga forces defeat Daesh. In addition to combat operations they are equipping four peshmerga brigades and are also looking to equip more peshmerga and Iraqi army brigades for the Mosul area. Included within this will be chemical protection and detection devices. Even if there is no actual attack, there is still the likelihood that Iraqi forces will come across chemical weapon agents and explosive caches in the north. Daesh had a habit of putting everything with a hazard sticker together in one site, regardless of any cross-reactivity or what the storage conditions might be like. In some cases this could be a task for civilian forces, but dependent on the situation the peshmerga CBRN could well have to deal with it.

Brigadier Ismail explained: “One of the problems with fighting ISIS, and why they are still around, is because they make so many tunnels. Some are underground and others are in caves in the mountains. We are concerned, as maybe they buried some chemical equipment or chemical agent in tunnels or caves and they are really difficult places to infiltrate. Coalition forces are still trying to bomb them and shelling their tunnels, but they have so many long distance tunnels and we don't know where they could be in the Hamrin mountains or in the disputed territories like Hwaeeia or Qarachoog.

“It was too early for prime minister Haider al-Abadi to announce the defeat of ISIS in 2017, because even then they still existed. The Iraqi army would enter the cities and control the main roads, but they never went to some of the open areas or mopped up ISIS villages like Hawaeeia and the Hamreen mountains or other places close to the Iraq/Syria border.”

Unlike when I first spoke to Brig Gen Ismail, the Kurdistan region doesn’t have to rely on the peshmerga alone. In addition to the Iraqi civil defence units, they have now built up some of their own civilian units that can deal with threats from Al Mishraq or any other hazmat situation. He explained the plan for the force. “We have firefighter units that are now building CBRN units under the ministry of the interior in the Kurdistan region. We saw the need for them in the past, when they were needed to deal with civilian accidents, like when Daesh attacked at Kirkuk. So while we plan to build a regiment for peshmerga CBRN there is also a plan within the ministry of the interior for their own CBRN unit. It will be based in Erbil. A centre has been opened for them, many of them have been trained outside the country, and they have been supplied with good equipment from the US.”

Another improvement in recent years has been the relationship with national CBRN units outside the Kurdistan region. Due to the

Iraqi and Kurdish CBRN forces are learning to fight together ©Ismail

nature of the warfighting, and the shortage of assets, that relationship had initially been fractious, but in the current breathing space they have moved ahead together. “We are looking forward to further improving the relationship between peshmerga CBRN and Iraqi CBRN. We have worked together successfully in the past as they provided us with training, support, advice and some equipment. Especially when we were first attacked with chemical weapons in 2015 the first team to assist was the Iraqi CBRN unit, who came and did a survey of what ISIS had attacked and what the danger was when ISIS used gas against us. We also had cooperation from the Iraqi government when we asked the UN and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, to view the situation on the ground. They came, saw the situation, the mortars and rockets and interviewed injured peshmerga. During our fight with ISIS, we had significant casualties, out of a total 10,000 injured peshmerga 400 were affected by chemical weapons. We're looking forward to cooperation with the Iraqi CBRN units.”

This close cooperation paid dividends when Covid hit, the Kurdistan health and peshmerga CBRN as well as other Iraqi agencies have been working together for the citizens. In addition to training peshmerga CBRN unit and health care staff they have also gone into cities to decontaminate them and educate the public. The whole process has strengthen relations at all levels.

Kurdistan will need to leverage this relationship in the coming years. The expected economic downturn post-Covid is going to have a negative impact on their plans to develop and grow the CBRN team, though Brig Gen Ismail is convinced they will have their regiment, as well as increased local tension. Such tension will swell Daesh’s ranks and prompt further misinformation about how Baghdad is not looking after youth in the regions, and this is likely to create problems for peshmerga and CBRN too. Additionally, there is the cost of the clean up from decades of strife. Not only those areas that were targeted by Daesh, but also places like Halabjah, which is still not being dealt with over 40 years later.

1 https://kurdistanmemoryprogramme.com/index/poison-gas/ 2 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/12/isis-launches-two-chemical-attacks-in-northern-iraq 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_chemical_attack 4 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3955005.stm 5 https://cbrneworld.com/magazine/archive/magazine-archive/2017-06 6 https://nationalinterest.org/feature/exclusive-inside-kurdistans-anti-isis-training-camps-17155 7 https://ahmadtan740.medium.com/the-hostile-against-isis-proceeds-in-iraq-93a755772c00 8 https://theglobalcoalition.org/en/why-are-coalition-forces-still-needed-iraq-syria/