The Western world’s most influential thinker on war, Carl von Clausewitz, observed that the value of the objective determines the magnitude and the duration of any war any nation will wage in its pursuit. Kurds know this especially well, as successive surrounding regimes, seeking to eliminate Kurdish power from the Middle East, have left them with few options and no objective more valuable than survival.

This well-explains the generational, bone-deep, Kurdish unwillingness to submit that the world has come to critically rely upon in the modern wars against Saddam Hussein, Ansar al Islam, al Qaeda, ISIS and other enemies of Humanity. Victory against these evils was not possible without the peshmerga. 

American soldiers saw this in early 2003 when politicians refused to allow the U.S. Army’s 4th Infantry Division overland access into Iraq from the north. This presented a serious, operational problem for the Coalition, as without an avenue of approach threatening Baghdad from the north, the Iraqi Army would not be forced to fight in two directions simultaneously and instead could commit its combat power south to confront Coalition troops entering from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. 

The Kurds offered a solution. Peshmerga and other Kurdish elements covertly readied airstrips in and around Erbil (Hewler) to receive American special forces and task-organized mechanized units. Once on the ground, both were important, of course, but the presence of mechanized units appeared to Saddam as an immediate threat of a combined Kurdish and American advance on Baghdad from the north, something even Saddam’s most incompetent generals could not ignore.

Consequently, the Iraqi Army was forced to keep a significant portion of its combat power oriented north and unavailable to oppose Coalition troops in the south. The result – after barely three weeks of combat, the Iraqi Army was destroyed, and Baghdad was in Coalition hands.

American soldiers also saw this in March of the same year during Operation Viking Hammer, when a handful of U.S. Army special forces and CIA agents linked up with a brigade’s worth of peshmerga and supported their offensive against al-Qaeda allies based in Beyara, Gulp, Sargat and Khormal. In less than a week, Ansar al Islam and its nascent chemical weapons capability were destroyed, and the group’s plans to inspire a jihadi insurgency across portions of Kurdistan were immediately ended.

The world saw this, too, starting in the summer of 2014 when ISIS erupted across Sunni Arab portions of Iraq, and the Iraqi Army ran away en masse. ISIS then raced to within 100 km of the Iranian border, nearly splitting the country in two, but they were stopped cold by the stubborn resistance of peshmerga near Jawlawla. 

Although the Iraqi Army chose to flee, the peshmerga chose to fight. They stepped forward to quickly establish a front 1000 kilometers long and then fought against ISIS, month after month, as the world’s main effort in the War to Defend Humanity. Consequently, the black flag of ISIS never fluttered over even a centimeter of Kurdish-controlled soil, and ISIS is now destroyed in Iraq and beyond. 

These are modern examples of the Kurds’ tenacity in the face of grave threats to their survival and freedom, of course, and there are many more, but they are nothing new. 

On 16 May 1982 in the tiny village of Hemek, eleven men from the 4th Jebari kert of the 57th Segermar teep were surrounded by an entire Iraqi Army brigade reinforced with helicopters, artillery, a special forces battalion, and a jaash unit. The Kurds refused to surrender. 

When the smoke cleared a day later, the Iraqis withdrew, and eight fearless peshmerga emerged from the rubble. Around their fighting positions they found the bodies of more than two hundred Iraqi soldiers left behind by their fleeing comrades. 

In early May of 1966 at the foot of Handrin Mountain, Mam Izzet and a few hundred peshmerga stood against an entire Iraqi Army brigade reinforced with artillery and close air support. At 3pm that day, he thought he would never see his family again. A few hours later the Iraqi brigade was destroyed, Baghdad humiliated, and Mam Izzet honored forever after as the Lion of Handrin. But this history goes much deeper.

Xenophon chronicled the Greek expedition into Persia in 401 BC and wrote that the Greeks lost more men in seven days fighting through the Kurds in the Zagros Mountains than they lost in two months fighting the Persians. 

Nearly two thousand years before this, Sargon, King of Akkad, conquered the plains of Mesopotamia and ruled from the shores of the Persian Gulf and across the basins of modern Iraq, but he failed to establish enduring control over the highland tribes of the Zagros Mountains. When Akkad fell two hundred years later, the King of Uruk, Utu-Hegal, struggled continuously against these same tribes, referring to them as “the stinging serpent of the mountains.”

These histories and countless more shaped the foundation for the very capable peshmerga of today. That’s a very good thing, because the peshmerga of today stand tall in the face their age-old dilemma:  enemies who surround them like wolves. 

The Kurds’ modern enemies, of course, augment their military levers with economic and diplomatic levers in their effort to undermine Kurdish power, but one thing remains certain – the more that enemies attempt to tighten the noose, the greater the Kurds will value their survival and freedom. Ask Clausewitz what that might mean.

Ernie Audino, Brigadier General, US Army (Retired), is a Senior Fellow at the Gold institute of International Strategy. He is the only US general to have previously served a full year in Iraq as chief combat advisor embedded in a peshmerga brigade.