National Geographic writer embeds with Kurdish troops ‘Fighting ISIS’

While embedded with the Kurdish military in Iraq for National Geographic Channel’s “Explorer” episode titled “Fighting ISIS,” correspondent Neil Shea was struck by how almost nonchalant the Kurds were about warfare.

“They were usually just sort of not at all tense and scared,” he says. “There were a few times when they were.

“But unless the action was right upon them, they were really just sort of hanging out, sort of having a good time, drinking tea, telling jokes – doing all that sort of stuff that Kurds normally do. So it was this almost casual sense of warfare.”

In the hourlong installment that premieres Sunday, the award-winning writer and contributor to National Geographic magazine embeds with the Peshmerga, a relatively small but battle-hardened group of fighters on the front line of the ground war in Iraq, to find out how they have managed to beat back the advancement of ISIS in their mountainous part of the region while areas around them have fallen.

Getting in with the Kurds, Shea reports, posed little problem as the group is generally friendly to Westerners.

This was reflected in the access he was granted by Kurdish commanders, who allowed him to go where he wanted to go and report on what he wanted to report on.

“It’s one of the few places in the world where George W. Bush is still a hero,” Shea explains, “and so they really feel like they were liberated by the Americans and they escaped so much of the destruction in the war that followed, that when an American shows up and wants to hear the Kurdish story, they’re almost more than happy to help you learn it. So getting in with the Kurds is not a problem. You know, sometimes you had to work with different commanders to figure out what they’d let you do. But at almost every turn we were allowed to see what we needed to see and go where we needed to go.”

Along the way, Shea got to know the Kurds as a generally warm and friendly people who want to preserve their land, their culture and their way of life but destroy this enemy. As for why the Kurds have succeeded in their fight against Islamic State forces while those from the West have not, Shea has a simple answer.

“They’re fighting for their survival,” he says. “They have their backs pressed up against the wall in a way that the Americans certainly didn’t and the Arabs, in some ways, didn’t either. … So that makes anybody fierce. But I think that once the Kurds figured out that ISIS was really, really bad, people rallied to the cause and fought ferociously. … The Kurds are very clearly up against a wall and they were able to unite and respond to it, at least for a little while.”