Excerpts
MARGARET WARNER (NewsHour): Racing south on the highway between Iraq’s Kurdish capital, Irbil, and Baghdad, miles of open desert unfold, dotted by villages and towns. But just a quarter of the way down, Iraq’s most vital commercial lifeline becomes the frontline.
The Islamic State group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has advanced to within 650 yards of the road. Kurdish forces Colonel Wria Hasan took us to one of many well-manned Kurdish Peshmerga outposts guarding the new frontier to show us just how close the militants’ forbidding flag flew.
What keeps the ISIS forces from just moving across this road?
COL. WRIA HASAN, Peshmerga (through interpreter): If they came closer, we could stop them, and we could move their way, but there are a lot Arabs living there.
MARGARET WARNER: So you’re saying it will be a very bloody battle if you tried to advance that way?
COL. WRIA HASAN (through interpreter): Yes it would be bloody, and many civilians would die.
MARGARET WARNER: Colonel Hasan was escorting us in his armored SUV to the town of Jalawla, 100 miles northeast of Baghdad, in southern Diyala Province. The province is now partly controlled by the Kurds since the Iraqi army collapsed before the Islamic extremists’ onslaught in mid-June.
We’d come to explore why, over the past month, the famed Peshmerga army, considered one of the best in the region, had also fallen back at several points along its internal frontier against the Islamist group.
General Mahmoud Sengawi commands this southern region, and on our way to the front, I asked him why he was now fighting to take back the strategically located town of Jalawla.
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GEN. HUSSEIN MANSOUR (through interpreter): There, we have problems larger than weapons. Arabs in those towns support ISIS. Jalawla has always been a bastion of Baathist support. There are 1,200 former high-ranking Baathist officers there. It’s always been a bastion of terrorists, even when the Americans were here.
MARGARET WARNER: To test that notion, we had Mohammed Mala Hassan, mayor of Khanaqin, where the Peshmerga are based, take us in his convoy of heavily armed men to meet one of the many Sunni Arabs he said have fled to Khanaqin from Jalawla.
Amer Yusef, a successful contractor, left with his family of 13 in June as the Islamic State began infiltrating Jalawla. He has a decidedly negative view of the Islamist group.
He said it’s true some Sunnis are with them, but often the extremists are more brutal with Sunnis.
AMER YUSEF, Contractor: (through interpreter): They are a terrorist organization that wants to harm us. They have harmed most of the families who have stayed in the town.
MARGARET WARNER: Many people say all Arabs here support the Islamic State. Is that true?
AMER YUSEF (through interpreter): I have a close friend who was a member of the municipality, my neighbor, and he is a Sunni Arab. They killed him few days ago. After taking him and his brother to their Sharia court, his brother said they killed them.
MARGARET WARNER: The Islamic State says they’re doing all of this in the name of pure Islam.
AMER YUSEF (through interpreter): No. They everyone’s enemy. Who are they killing the most? Christians or Muslims? They have killed mostly Muslims, both Sunnis and Shiites.
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