Global News

In late October, a US-led coalition jet bombed a small tarn once used by fishermen near the northern Iraqi town of Makhmour, formed by rainfall cradling at the foot of the Qara Chokh, a mountain whose rock face climbs sharply out of the arid plains below.

Staff Colonel Srud Barzanji points out from a windswept Qara Chokh mountain outpost, beyond the hanging mist, to the target of the strike called in by his men in the 46th Brigade of the Peshmerga, Iraqi Kurdistan’s military force. It hit a group who had appeared in sight for water — to drink and to bathe. They were ISIS fighters who had emerged from caves.

The moustachioed Peshmerga commander, 48, had driven up the newly built, winding mountain pass, swinging through checkpoints in his blue-plated Toyota Hilux while joking that he named his dog “Trump” after the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi in a US commando raid in northern Syria last month.

To the naked eye, the only thing that separates the green expanse that folds out of the Qara Chokh from any other rural area of Iraqi Kurdistan are the absent gas flares from the oilfields that burn across this region, known for its crude production. No ISIS flags fly above buildings to avoid air strikes, but the group is here.

Lawless mountain areas in northern Iraq like the one in front of the sandbagged Peshmerga base on top of Qara Chokh, roughly 60 kilometres south-east of Mosul, are where Iraqi Kurdish intelligence and military officials say thousands of ISIS fighters are preparing for the group’s resurgence after its loss of territory in Iraq and Syria.

Officials say militants are hiding out in hard-to-reach, inhospitable cave complexes and tunnel networks to evade detection near Makhmour, the town they once controlled in 2014, using scare tactics to coerce local villagers, and capitalising on disenfranchised Iraqis largely ignored by Baghdad and mistreated by Iran-backed militias. They are operating in conditions similar to those that helped it to reach its zenith, a demi-state about equal in size to the area of the United Kingdom.