True Faith and Allegiance

12

The wild-eyed young man sprinted across the flat ground, his chest heaving from the exertion of the run, the fear, and the weight of the rifle in his hands — and then he jolted back with a slap of metal on bone and whirled dead onto the dirt.

Four meters from the tumbling corpse, Xozan Barzani kept going, racing headlong into danger, over brown hardscrabble land, through the supersonic snaps of close-passing gunfire. Men dropped to his left and to his right, while he and others like him continued on to their target. Two hundred meters ahead of him a ceramics factory served as an enemy stronghold. His orders were to take it; his orders were foolish, and it appeared he’d soon pay the price of obeying them, just like the dead man on his left, and the others falling all around.

In Kurdish, the word peshmerga means “one who faces death.” Barzani was a Peshmerga captain, the leader of a company of troops that had numbered 120 three days earlier, but now was down to sixty-six men still able to hold a rifle and press a trigger. His company’s heavy machine gunners were dead, their weapons captured by the enemy, and his single recoilless rifle had run out of ammunition in the first hours of the battle.

He and his men had no cover other than a few rills in the dirt, some low earthen berms at various angles — none of which were very helpful in concealing them from the enemy — and a couple burned-out hulks of fighting vehicles. The only real cover was the ceramics factory, and it was now 185 meters away and in the hands of well-entrenched Islamic State fighters.

As a young boy Xozan had learned to distinguish the difference between incoming and outgoing rounds, and it sounded to him now like the enemy had vastly superior numbers of guns and seemingly limitless ammo.

He estimated the enemy’s remaining strength at well over one hundred fighters, all with cover and concealment, and helped out by heavy weapons and vehicles. He’d seen two Russian-built BRDM-2 armored scout vehicles with coaxial machine guns, and at least four technicals, pickup trucks with mounted machine guns.

Things had been going well for the Peshmerga for the past few months, strategically speaking, but as is often the case in war, the situation on the ground appeared a lot more dire than when looking at the map. While the Kurds, along with help from NATO airpower, had been advancing on multiple fronts toward the ISIS-held city of Mosul, the Islamic State had conducted a surprise counterattack east up the road toward Kalak, with their eyes on a strategically important bridge there.

Barzani’s battalion, just off the front lines of the fighting to the northwest, was rushed into the line of advance.

The Kalak bridge was secured by the Peshmerga, and all was good, till someone far above Barzani decided to press the initiative and commit his battalion to an advance. This might have looked good on paper, but Barzani’s company as well as the three others in the battalion were exhausted and woefully short on supplies. With not enough vehicles and heavy weapons, the battalion was ordered to the west, into ISIS-held lands, with orders to take Karemlash.

Now, two days later, Barzani figured his dead body would be found as close to Karemlash as he would ever get, and he was still kilometers away.

As soon as the Peshmerga attack began, armored civilian trucks loaded with improvised explosive devices had rumbled up the Mosul highway from Islamic State — held territory, and detonated in or near the Peshmerga lines, and slowing this slaughter had cost Barzani’s forces all their remaining RPGs, most of which had been ineffective against these suicide tanks.

After that it was close-in fighting on the open ground. ISIS finally pulled back to the ceramics factory, but Barzani’s company had no indirect-fire weapons to dislodge them, and the order to take the factory with AK-47s and boot leather was absolute madness.

Barzani stumbled over a low berm now, and found himself in the middle of an ISIS forward scouting position. Two black-clad men seemed as surprised to see the Kurd as he was to see them. He fired his wire-stocked AK-47 from his hip, dropped a bearded man at a distance of five meters, and when one of Barzani’s sergeants shot the other man through the jaw, they both softly chanted “Allahu Akbar,” their words indecipherable because of their heavy breathing.

Just then the dirt and stone around them kicked up, bits of rock pelted the captain in the face and hands, as a heavy machine gun, probably on the roof of the ceramics factory, opened up on his position.

Barzani dove headfirst into the foxhole with the bodies for cover, then he looked around for his sergeant. The man was dead three meters from the hole, his head missing.

Barzani had told himself he would keep running all the way to the factory, but despite this, his training took over, and he remained there under cover as the machine gun tilled the ground inches from his head.

Three men lay dead nearby, but looking down the pocked desert landscape, he saw a few dozen of his men still in the fight. They had all found their own little holes to crawl into. It filled him with pride that he would die today with such brave warriors, but he could not stop thinking about Kalak, the Kurdish town ten kilometers behind him, and the Kurdish civilians there. Women. Children. The aged. The wounded.

He’d never take the factory, and when Barzani and his men were all dead, ISIS would have no one to stop them from heading right into Kalak, driving straight up the main street and taking whatever they wanted, including the lives of every last living thing.

Just then, the machine-gun fire stopped, and he could hear the rumble of heavy equipment. He peered over the edge of the foxhole; saw both of the BRDM-2s rumbling out of the ceramics factory, fifty meters apart, and heading in his direction.

The scout cars were armored with up to fourteen millimeters of steel; the Peshmerga Kalashnikovs would do nothing more than annoy the occupants of the cars with the sound of bullets pinging off the hulls.

And the machine guns on the roof of the factory had Barzani’s company pinned down in little holes like rats, so the armored cars could come and methodically clean them out.

Three unarmored technicals came out behind the scout cars, hauling more weapons and fighters his way. They were led by a white Toyota Hilux with a fifty-caliber machine gun mounted in the bed.

Barzani spoke as calmly as he could into his radio. He knew if he ordered a retreat now, whoever was left would be shot in the back, because there was nearly a kilometer of open ground behind them. “Brothers, do not waste your fire on the armored vehicles. Kill the technicals. Shoot the drivers, the gunners. We will martyr ourselves today, and we will do it fighting, not hiding!”

The chattering of AKs from the dirt to his left and right lifted his spirits, emboldened him, but only until the two BRDM-2s opened up with their KPV 14.5s and their coaxial 7.62s, raking back and forth, keeping heads down, increasing the carnage.

Barzani knew he and his men would all die in the dirt, and then Kalak would fall by dawn.

The closest BRDM-2 was just one hundred meters away from him now, churning up the hard earth to Barzani’s left with its machine guns. He tried to put it out of his mind so he could focus the blade sight of his rifle on the front windshield of the white Hilux barreling right down toward his foxhole, its own machine gun thumping loud in the air as the truck bounced across on the brown and barren landscape.

But just as Barzani readied to fire on the truck, an ungodly sound ripped through the sky over his head. He turned to look, and his eyes blinked hard at the sight of the nearest BRDM-2 disappearing in a cloud of dust.

It stopped rolling forward, stopped firing. The dust settled while the Peshmerga captain looked on, confused by whatever the hell had just happened.

And then it happened again.

The sound of ripping metal, the strikes of high-powered cannon rounds, sparks and flames erupting out of the armored car, and then, out of the dustup from the dirt around the vehicle, an explosion and a fireball.

Barzani looked left and right at his men, but there was no reason to do so. He knew better than anyone in the company that there existed no weapon in his arsenal that could have done what he’d just witnessed.

A private far to his left pointed to the blue sky to the north. It took Barzani a second to focus on a speck there, but the speck grew quickly. It was a helicopter gunship, American, and within seconds, the sparkle of light from its nose told him it was firing its chain gun.

Barzani shifted his eyes to the second BRDM-2 just as it, too, was enveloped by the brown dust of these flat lands.

High above and just behind the first helicopter, a second helo dotted the sky.

They were American Apaches from the U.S. Army, and they’d just thrown Barzani and his men a lifeline.

Peshmerga captain Xozan Barzani couldn’t hear the radio broadcast coming from the helicopter racing over the landscape a thousand meters to his north, but if he could, he might have been surprised by the sound of a calm female voice on the net. “Pyro One-Two, Pyro One-One. Target bravo is toast. That’s all the light armor. I’m goin’ after the soft-skinned vehicles.”

A male voice responded instantly. This was the helo far above and just behind the helo firing. “Pyro One-Two, roger. Smoke those technicals.”

“Pyro One-One is engaging.”

Captain Carrie Ann Davenport was the copilot-gunner of an AH-64E Apache attack helicopter, call sign Pyro 1–1, hovering north 1,500 yards from the ceramics factory, barely outside effective range of the ISIS machine guns, but well within range of her M230 chain gun.

Behind and just above Davenport in the cockpit of the helo was her pilot, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Troy Oakley. Oakley spoke into his headset now. “Nail that bastard!”

Carrie Ann squeezed off a ten-round burst, watched the camera image of the technical on the multifunction display on her console, and realized her rounds had missed, striking the ground just behind the moving Hilux.

“Damn, adjusting.”

“You got ’em,” Oak encouraged from the pilot’s seat.

Davenport led the technical and pressed the trigger again. As the chain gun fired, it belched puffs of gray smoke fifty feet down in angles off the port and starboard sides of the nose of the aircraft. Thirty-millimeter rounds sprayed out of the M230, and the Hilux 1,500 yards away flipped over at speed, skidded on its roof, and immediately burst into flames.

“Oh, shit!” Oakley exclaimed. “There’s one for the highlight reel.”

Davenport was already looking for her next target. “Seventy rounds remaining. Wish we had a few Hydras left. I could use them on the techs and the thirty mike-mike on these troops in the open.”

The Hydra-70 were 2.75-inch FFAR, or folding-fin aerial rockets. Both Pyro 1–1 and Pyro 1–2 had left their forward operating base near Erbil with a full close-support role complement of thirty-eight of the unguided rockets, but they had used them all in an attack on an ISIS armory and fuel depot just north of Mosul.

“Just do what you can. We’re bingo in five.”

Davenport said, “Roger. I’ll deal with the trucks and then we’re outta here. The Pesh will have to clean up the squirters.”

This flight of two AH-64Es had been heading back to base after annihilating their primary targets when they were notified of the heavy fighting west of Kalak. In the scheme of things, with engagements up and down a semicircular front line a hundred miles in length, the fighting at Kalak wasn’t seen as strategically important. Yes, ISIS threatened to take control of the bridge there, but the Kurdish and Iraqi attack westward wasn’t planning on using this road, and the strategic objective had been all along to encircle and cut off these ISIS troops.

Still, when the Pyro flight heard reports of multiple technicals and light armor approaching a company of Peshmerga caught in open ground, they checked their moving map displays, their fuel levels, and their weapons loadouts, and decided they had enough gas and guns to divert and make a couple passes on their way back to their base.

Pyro 1–2 wasn’t involved in this fight, because they were down to zero rockets, and had only fifty rounds left in their M230. They flew high-cover, ready to provide support in an emergency and to help with target acquisition, while Pyro 1–1, Davenport and Oakley’s aircraft, took on the targets of opportunity below.

The last of the technicals turned around and began racing back to the ceramics factory, but Pyro 1–1 didn’t care that the Islamic State fighters were disengaging. The men in the truck were still alive, and their equipment was still operational.

Oakley said, “You gonna frag that last one?”

Davenport’s answer was given with a rumble of the M230 below the cockpit. Sixteen hundred yards away the ground behind the technical turned to dust and fire, and then the vehicle itself exploded.

Oakley came over the radio now. “Pyro Two, Pyro One-One, that’s all the big stuff we see from here. You have eyes on anything else before we RTB?”

Pyro 1–2 was piloted by a CWO-4 named Wheaton, and his authoritative voice came over Davenport and Oakley’s headsets. “Pyro One-One. I’m, uh… I’m seeing emplacements on the roof of that rectangular building… Uh, one-point-five klicks southeast of you. The taller structure. You see ’em?”

Davenport looked at the FLIR camera view on her multifunction display. Oakley increased altitude a little, and Davenport panned the camera across the top of the building. The sandbagged positions came into view, and the one in the middle flashed, causing black-hot blooms on the infrared screen.

Davenport said, “Roger that, One-Two. Looks like three gun positions. A couple PKs and… uh… That’s a twelve-point-seven in the middle there.”

Wheaton said, “You wanna rake those guys before we exfil?”

“That’s affirm. I’ve got them. We’re bingo fuel, but we can put thirty rounds on them before exfil.”

“Yeah, go ahead and light ’em up, One-One.”

Davenport took a moment to direct Oakley to a position where she could get a good angle for her rounds onto the machine gun emplacements, then she fired three short bursts, one at each weapon.

The carnage was immediate, but a few men crawled across the roof through the bodies and wreckage.

CWO-3 Oakley said, “Nail that Kord again, just to be sure.” The Kord was the Russian-made 12.7-millimeter machine gun in the center. It had the power to, among other things, take down an attack helicopter at great range, and no Apache pilot liked seeing one of those left operational in the hands of the enemy.

Davenport unleashed twenty more rounds of 30-millimeter shells onto the roof of the ceramics factory, destroying all equipment and virtually all of the ISIS fighters positioned there.

After speaking again with 1–2, Oakley turned his aircraft to the northeast, flying behind Wheaton and leaving the battle behind.

Carrie Ann Davenport knew she had taken out the biggest threats to the Peshmerga in the open. She didn’t have a feeling of victory, or even of great satisfaction, just a feeling that she wished they had the fuel and the ordnance to do more for the brave Peshmerga below. If she and Oakley had had more gas and guns, they could have virtually cut a swath of safety all the way through the ISIS stronghold in the factory.

One hour later Captain Xozan Barzani clicked his last loaded magazine in his AK, racked the slide to charge the weapon, and thumbed the fire select lever up to the safe position.

He stood in the center of the ceramics factory.

The fight was over.

The tide had turned instantly with the arrival of the American helicopters, and now the last of the ISIS troops had disappeared back to the west. They were all on foot, which gave Barzani great pleasure, because he’d seen with his own eyes as bearded men in black robes had climbed out of operational pickup trucks and run from them as if they were ticking time bombs, so sure were they that the helos were targeting anything with four wheels to the west of the Peshmerga line.

Barzani walked up to a brown truck on the road through the factory complex, put his hand on the roof, and stroked it in admiration. He looked inside the cab and saw the keys in the ignition. This was not a technical — there was no heavy weapon mounted in the back — but it was a good solid vehicle, and in the front passenger side he saw an RPK light machine gun with a cylindrical seventy-five-round magazine and, on the floor of the vehicle, a canvas satchel with three more loaded mags.

This was one truck he was glad the Americans had left alone.

After his squad leaders reported in, he learned he had only fifty-one troops left in his company from the 120 he had when he arrived at Kalak three days earlier, and he would mourn those martyred this afternoon when he had time to do so. But for now he gave the order to collect every weapon, every bullet, every knife, and every scrap of intelligence that could be found on the bodies. When this was done they would go back to Kalak to their sandbagged positions, and they would hope that ISIS would need some time to regroup before attacking again.

He would have liked to have held the ceramics factory, but it was too isolated a position to defend with fifty men and no heavy weapons. He knew better than to depend on the luck of an arrival of American Army helicopters over the battlefield the next time.