In this essay for The New Yorker, Elliot Ackerman travels from Turkey to a peshmerga front-line position near Makmour, Iraq, where he finds the war against ISIS reduced to eight men, a few rifles, and a single aging machine gun.

The Erbil Battalion at Makmour

Ackerman meets Staff Colonel Salim Surche, whose battalion recaptured Makmour after a brief ISIS occupation, and who describes being outgunned, with only light machine guns against ISIS's armored Humvees.

Eight Men and One Machine Gun

At the forward-most position, Ackerman meets Sergeant Farhad Karzan and the eight peshmerga fighters holding a line less than two kilometres from ISIS, armed with a single Soviet-era PKM and rusted belts of ammunition.

A Poem, and an Attack at Dawn

Recalling a William Carlos Williams poem about how much depends on a red wheelbarrow, Ackerman reflects on how this new war, too, will be decided by the smallest of things, and learns the next morning that the Erbil Battalion had attacked at first light, retaking the cement factory across the line.

Read the Original Article

This essay originally appeared in The New Yorker.

Read “Eight Men, and One Gun, on the Iraqi Front” at The New Yorker →