The number of American troops in the campaign against ISIS-Operation Inherent Resolve-has quietly escalated in recent months, to somewhere between four thousand and five thousand. He was the second American killed since the U.S. It’s also the place where a Marine was killed this month by ISIS rocket fire. The farming district of Makhmour is also one of the areas where ISIS has used primitive but deadly forms of chemical weapons-mustard gas and chlorine-since last August, most recently last month. There is little left, according to the war grapevine, for those who may one day want to return. Millions of Iraqis fled as ISIS blitzed through the north, in 2014, but a determined few have been reluctant to surrender their herds or small farms. A curly-haired eighteen-year-old sheepherder, Mustafa Maghdid, picked up a young lamb to show me. I was slowed by a flock of sheep and goats crossing the road to a grassy plain sprinkled with budding yellow wildflowers. ![]() The trip to Camp Swift, in Makhmour, the forward U.S. Marine CorpsĪmerica’s front line facing the Islamic State is more than two thousand miles from Brussels, as the crow flies, and then another ninety minutes by country road from the Kurdish capital of Erbil, in northern Iraq. Photograph Courtesy Corporal Andre Dakis / U.S. is coaching the nation’s rival religious sects and ethnic factions to join forces for the biggest offensive on ISIS yet.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |