KIRKUK // Lieutenant Colonel Faxradin Najmaldin, a Kurdish officer in charge of a mine clearing unit on the Kirkuk front line, is no stranger to explosives.
Drafted into Saddam Hussein’s army in 1985, he became a so-called “sapper” — or mine clearing expert — during the Iran-Iraq war.
But since the Kurds began fighting ISIL in June last year, Lt Col Najmaldin and his men had to quickly adopt to new methods. Trained in mine clearance, they now face a new threat: improvised explosive devices (IEDs), crude but always changing weapons deployed in great numbers by the militants.
“Before Daesh and Al Qaeda, all mines were known and understood. But with Daesh, all [of] the IEDs are different. This has made our job more difficult,” says Lt Col Najmaldin.
Since the Kurds halted the militant group’s advance on Kirkuk in June 2014, Lt Col Najmaldin estimates that his sappers have cleared as many as 7,000 IEDs.
“IEDs are the biggest threat we have to deal with when we attack or have liberated territory,” says General Araz Abdulkadir, who commands a brigade fighting at Daquq on the Kirkuk front.
ISIL plants roadside bombs and booby traps buildings and terrain to slow the advance of its opponents. The devices are the biggest cause of death and injury inflicted on the Kurdish fighters, who are also referred to as Peshmerga.
The sappers take pride in their work.
“I joined this unit because IEDs are a big problem, and we save the lives of a lot of Peshmerga with what we do,” says Baxtiar Mahmud, a 25-year-old sapper.
But saving the lives of others comes at a high cost.
Lt Col Najmaldin has lost three of his men so far, and four more have been seriously wounded.
After the Kurds pushed ISIL back in several offensives around Kirkuk in the spring, the approximately 1,050-kilometre front line has become mostly static. While this has reduced the amount of territory the sappers have to clear, it has not made their job less dangerous.
The extremists seize every opportunity to plant their deadly devices, even slipping behind Kurdish lines to lay roadside bombs.
Often the sappers operate directly on the front line, or even in the “no-man’s-land” between the lines to clear the way for an assault, exposing them to enemy fire.
Mr Mahmud, whose demeanour exudes an unflappable calm, came under sniper fire only two days earlier while trying to clear an IED. He was also targeted last month, while trying to defuse a deadly web of wires that connected dozens of explosive devices in a contested village.
Gen Abdulkadir recounts firefights earlier in the year which set ablaze the dry grass in the no-man’s-land between the two sides. In one such incident, over 40 IEDs were set off by the heat of the fire, he says.
The devices are mass produced at bombmaking factories scattered around ISIL territory in Iraq.
According to Gen Abdulkadir, coalition air strikes destroyed two such facilities in the Hawiyah Province adjoining Kirkuk last month, and the Peshmerga captured another during an offensive in April.
ISIL bombmakers are skilled and innovative, says Lt Col Najmaldin. He believes this is because many of these men learnt to handle explosives while serving in Saddam Hussein’s army.
While the charges have remained the same — artillery shells, mortar rounds, cooking pots and canisters filled with home made explosives — the detonators continue to evolve, posing a dangerous challenge.
The unit does not only have to worry about the ingenuity of ISIL, it also sorely lacks the resources to do its job.
The sappers have a handful of US-built armoured cars, which help them get safely to and from the bomb site.
Unfortunately, the vehicles were stripped of the metal grills protecting their sides after they were offloaded in Baghdad, says Lt Col Najmaldin, making them vulnerable to rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs).
An armoured car was recently lost when ISIL managed to disable the vehicle with an RPG, forcing his men to abandon it.
The Kurdish sappers are also short basic safety equipment such as body armour and robots, which would allow them to defuse IEDs from a safe distance.
But danger is not something Lt Col Najmaldin thinks about much.
“Our approach to work is not to be afraid. Because if we are afraid, and our hands shake, maybe we’ll make a mistake,” he says.
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
