IN A military camp close to the Syrian Kurdish city of Derik a group of 26 young Iraqi men dressed in camouflage stood to attention as instructors and a sheikh officiated a ceremony to mark the end of their training on August 27th. Martyr Dilovan camp is the new name of an old base being used to train men from the Yazidi sect, a small ancient minority in Iraq. The camp has been renamed after a Yazidi who died in battle in August.
The men will return to their home country to fight the Islamic State (IS), the extremist group that has taken over swathes of Iraq including the Yazidi heartland in Sinjar province. Following the IS takeover of Sinjar in early August, more than 15,000 Yazidis found refuge in Syria when the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the armed wing of the leading Syrian Kurdish party, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), led them through a manmade "safety corridor" into Syria.
Many later crossed back into the relative safety of the Kurdish region of Iraq, but more than a thousand Yazidis volunteered for a one-week military training course in Syria. It is run by the YPG and the men will join them and members of its parent organisation, Turkey's Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), who currently control Iraq’s Sinjar mountain. The forces are known as the Sinjar Resistance Units.
The Yazidi recruits are being trained to use Kalashnikovs, sniper rifles and hand grenades. They are also put through daily exercise and history lessons about Syria’s Kurdish region. Yazidis from further afield have joined up too. Members of the diaspora have flown in from countries as far away as Russia and Germany, while some drove from Sulaymaniyah and Erbil in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region.
The new union between Iraq’s Yazidi community and the Kurds of Syria has helped both groups. The YPG provides the Yazidi units with the military expertise that comes from two years of fighting IS in Syria, while the Yazidis share their understanding of Sinjar’s geography. “We are the eyes of the YPG,” says a Yazidi fighter as the men pile into pickup trucks.
“If the Yazidis aren’t protected we are not protected,” says Salih Muslim, the PYD's leader, of the geographic proximity. The YPG also appears to be trying to incorporate the soldiers under the banner of the PKK, in an attempt to give them a cause to fight for and to expand the Kurdish party's influence. The men responded to instructors’ calls of “who are we?” with “followers of Apo”—the PKK leader Abullah Ocalan, in jail in Turkey—and “people of Sinjar”.
The YPG has armed the Yazidi units with guns.But it is unclear what they will be able to bring to the fight. “We don’t have heavy weapons and the Yazidis don’t have much military experience, so we have been training them in guerilla warfare,” said the director of training, a petite woman with a prosthetic hand who goes by the nom de guerre Berivan Lalesh.
Both Syria and Iraq's Kurds say their limited arsenal has been an obstacle in their fight against IS. They say they are using Kalashnikovs, hand grenades and sniper rifles to battle against American equipment that Islamic State militants grabbed from army bases, including Humvees and long-range rockets.
Yet enthusiasm is in large supply. Yazidi units are not yet being deployed to the frontline but will be moved closer as they gain experience. But Ms Lalesh says most of the Yazidi men who come to the camp ask to be immediately deployed. “The YPG had a hard time keeping them here to train them,” she says.
Kamaran, a 20-year-old Yazidi from Sinjar, sits outside the camp’s rundown building clutching a Kalashnikov, waiting to head to Sinjar with the rest of his comrades. He is confident the Yazidis can help to win the fight. “I call on all young Yazidis to join the Yazidi Resistance Units,” he says.
In an almost theatrical exit, the fighters sped through the barbed wire gate leaving behind echoes of “we are the people of Sinjar”. Not long after the convoys had left a Yazidi from Mosul arrived at the camp, asking the YPG to send him to Sinjar to fight IS. “You can’t stop these young men because of what they have been through—everyone has lost family members,” says Ms Lalesh as a young female soldier offers the new arrival a glass of water.
