Members of the Kurdish peshmerga forces gather in the town of Sinjar, Iraq November 13, 2015. REUTERS/ARI JALAL
Mike Giglio, BuzzFeed: Inside The War Against Isis
In the wake of the Paris terror attacks, Western leaders ramped up airstrikes against ISIS. But the real fight is happening on the ground. Mike Giglio reports from the Syrian front for BuzzFeed News.
AL-HAWL, Syria — Khalil Darwish, a sheikh in northeastern Syria, stood in the center of his small desert village and recalled the moment the war arrived. Earlier this month, U.S.-backed fighters took cover in some houses as they advanced on ISIS across the sparse terrain. Then the militants sent in a suicide attacker with a car bomb, killing six civilians, including Darwish’s wife. “We had been like a buffer zone,” Darwish, an aging man wearing oversized eyeglasses and a white dishdasha robe, said as he pointed to the crater from the blast. “Then it became very dangerous.”
Far below the warplanes flown by the U.S. and its allies in their campaign against ISIS, Syrians in forgotten towns and villages like Darwish’s are witnessing what it means to fight the jihadis on the ground. At the southern edge of Hasakah province, near the border with Iraq, the path the battles have traced over the last month winds along dirt roads, through improvised minefields, and past mud-brick homes crushed by airstrikes, signs of a desperate war often fought across desperate land.
WNU Editor: After this reading this report .... you cannot help but feel that this war is going to go on for a long time.
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