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During the Erbil ‘wobble’ the Kurds deployed a very capable Special Forces unit. Its commander, Polad Talabani, grew up in Beckenham, south London, with his brother Lahur, now head of Kurdish intelligence. Both greet you with a cheery Estuary English ‘All right mate’. Polad was training to be a motor mechanic at Bromley College before deciding to return to his homeland. He told me, though, that he had spent his early childhood in the mountains and that his fifth birthday present was a pistol. The new Iraqi prime minister, Haider Al-Abadi, also has strong British connections. The story is that he used to ‘fix the lifts’ at Bush House, former home of the BBC World Service. Not quite. He did a PhD in electrical engineering in Manchester and later joined the lift company that had the BBC contract. Still, a colleague swears she saw Dr Al-Abadi in overalls, tinkering with the lifts.
We leave Iraq for Syria, crossing the Tigris on a pontoon bridge put up by the UN. Little groups of exhausted refugees from the Yazidi religious minority wait to cross the other way. We’re all going through Syria from one bit of Iraq to another because the Islamic State has blocked almost every road. Once over the border, signs point the way in Kurdish, Arabic and Aramaic. A plethora of Syrian Kurdish armed formations are in charge here: the HPG, the YBS, the YPG and the group that used to fight the Turks, the PKK. All are scornful of the Iraqi Kurd Peshmerga. They say they fled leaving the Yazidis to their fate. The Iraqi Kurdish forces, meanwhile, are drawn from the erstwhile rivals, the KDP and the PUK. The Kurds are complicated.
A Syrian Kurdish officer — wearing traditional baggy pantaloons and sash — gives us an escort to Mount Sinjar, which is back in Iraq. More than 100,000 Yadizis fled over the mountain. Some are still making their way out. We drive across desert, threading our way between Arab towns and villages held by the Islamic State. Our escort takes a wrong turn and slams into reverse, a jihadi checkpoint ahead. Even in a vehicle, the heat is intolerable. The refugees walked 40 miles in more than 50˚C. A female Kurdish soldier tells me her job was simply to hold the hand of the dying after they had fallen by the wayside.
Eventually, we are sitting on top of Mount Sinjar with about 60 Yazidi men. Shade comes from a tarpaulin bearing the slogan ‘From the British people’, having been dropped by the RAF the night before. The talking is done by an elderly Yazidi in a brown felt hat shaped like half an eggshell, four plaits of grey hair hanging down. We discuss the Yazidis’ belief in the ‘Peacock Angel’, who defied God and was cast out of heaven, to return after begging forgiveness. In Muslim theology this is Lucifer — that’s why the Islamic State persecutes Yazidis. More of the Yazidis’ ways are explained. Yazidi priests are celibate, though self-castration has (mercifully) died out. Yazidis don’t eat lettuce. That dates from a massacre by the Turks that took place in a lettuce field, Yazidi blood soaking the leaves.
A couple of days later we walk into a restaurant in Iraqi Kurdistan. A table of extravagantly moustachioed men offer to buy our dinner, having mistaken us for Americans. ‘Thank you for bombing our enemies,’ they say happily. That evening US airstrikes forced the Islamic State to abandon Mosul dam, though the jihadis furiously deny it on Twitter, their preferred propaganda medium. Twitter has started to close some IS accounts. A furious jihadi tweet, translated from the original Arabic, says: ‘Pass this to the Twitter Admin, the dog. Either leave us to tweet as we wish, or we will blow you up. You have been warned.’ The Arab villages around the dam are empty, some of their men having joined the losing side of the battle. The Islamic State is not purely some foreign blight but something which has grown from the soil of Iraq, a fact of some importance for any country contemplating an open-ended bombing campaign. I asked the Kurdish mayor of Makhmour — briefly conquered by the jihadis — if he could ever again live with those of his Sunni Arab neighbours who’d sided with the Islamic State. ‘No, of course not,’ came his answer, quick as a flash. Step by step, then, Erbil is becoming the capital city of a country, and not just of a region.
Paul Wood is a BBC correspondent.
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