[National Review] Black Tiger Military Base, Mala Qara Village, Iraq — Less than 60 miles from Islamic State–held Mosul, Commander Sirwan Barzani enters a room filled with troops and maps. His Kurdish peshmerga soldiers promptly leap to their feet in deference.
Commander Barzani and his troops — peshmerga literally translates to “those who face death” — are on the front line of a perilous fight against the Islamic State. This summer, he tells me in excellent English, the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq “just woke up and saw [that we suddenly had] more than 1,000 kilometers of border with the most dangerous terrorist group in the world.”
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