Remembering Iraqi special forces soldier 'Spongebob' BBC

Ahmed "Talqa" was killed on Friday.

He hated that name. Talqa means "bullet" in Arabic and Ahmed preferred "SpongeBob" - the nickname given to him by his son because of his goofy, gap-toothed smile.

Ahmed's name cannot be printed in full because he is - sorry, was - a member of Iraq's elite Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS), more commonly known as the Golden Division, and it may endanger the rest of his family to do so.

That in itself is a telling fact about the state of Iraq more than 13 years after the US-led invasion.

Ahmed was involved in all of the wars of his generation and he was one of the bravest, kindest, funniest men I have known.

Ahmed's nom de guerre, Talqa, came from the slugs pulled out of him nearly a decade ago.

A Shia Muslim from Baghdad, Ahmed had been driving home one night when he was pulled over at a police checkpoint.

The federal police force had been so infiltrated by Shia militias at the time that it effectively was one - some say it still is.

The policemen at that checkpoint pulled Ahmed out of his car after checking his ID. Other men were waiting for him.

At the time, Shia militias had been targeting Iraqi special forces personnel in retaliation for carrying out raids against them throughout the capital and somehow they had got hold of Ahmed's name.

He was bundled into the boot of a car and driven to an abandoned warehouse where he was tortured. His ordeal began with both of his hands being nailed to a wooden board.

"I kept telling them that I didn't work with the Americans," Ahmed told me.

But they did not stop, pulling out each of his fingernails with a set of pliers and resuscitating him each time he passed out from the pain.

They then put a circular saw to his forehead. "They were trying to cut my face off - what's wrong with these people?"

Ahmed never confessed to being in the special forces.

A hood was placed over his head and he was shot five times. One bullet grazed his skull, causing blood to seep through the hood. The militiamen were convinced that he was dead.

They dumped his body on a rubbish dump in a Sunni Muslim area - a common practice during the sectarian war that peaked from 2006 to 2007 - as they sought to lay blame at the door of another community for murder and make it less likely the victim would get a decent burial.

Counter to the narrative of hatred, however, an elderly Sunni man carried Ahmed's body to the hospital.

Ahmed recovered. He tried to find and thank this kind stranger but he could not be found.

Hospital staff told him that after bringing in Ahmed the man had been grabbed by another set of Iraqi policemen, who blamed him for Ahmed's wounds.

There was no record of the man's arrest and he joins the untold thousands of Iraqis who have disappeared in the country's cycles of violence and revenge.

Ahmed, the great survivor, was killed in Mosul when an IS militant blew up a car bomb beside the Humvee in which he was manning the gun turret.

Ahmed was an outstanding gunner. Earlier this year, he had saved my life when a suspected car bomb came screeching towards us in the badlands of Iraq's western province of Anbar.

Mosul is not Anbar. It is a massive city with narrow streets and a population of more than a million, with IS fighters and car bombs lying in wait.

In a matter of seconds, a car bomb can appear and devastate Iraqi forces.

It's the jihadists' version of an air strike and the main reason why Iraqi special forces casualties are mounting. Nothing was left of Ahmed's to bury - no body, no clothes.

Ahmed was one of the many CTS personnel to have been at the centre of Iraq's wars since 2003.

Originally set up by the US military as the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Force (ICTF), recruits were expected to meet similar standards expected of US special forces personnel.

After 10 days of basic training in Baghdad, candidates were sent to Jordan to undertake a three-month selection process.

Out of an initial pool of some 1,200 men, only 80 made it through.

Throughout selection, candidates were not allowed to call each other by their names, using only assigned numbers.

In a country that would eventually be torn apart by sectarian tensions, the system had the unexpected advantage of creating an esprit de corps among Shia Arab, Sunni Arab and Kurdish recruits.

The intensive training and meritocratic command structure - a novelty - helped create perhaps the only success story of the US military's efforts to rebuild the Iraqi security forces.

As the Americans left in 2011, standards slipped and selection changed.

But the CTS remained the most professional and least sectarian fighting force in the country.

And when the Iraqi army collapsed after marauding Sunni supremacists tore through the country in 2014, they were the last soldiers standing - folk heroes to the point that even Shia militiamen began donning ICTF patches.

In nearly every battle against IS, Iraq's special forces have been the tip of the spear.

Ahmed was there in Ramadi, in Hit, in Falluja and, finally, in Mosul - just as he was there in earlier battles against al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Shia militias.

Despite his war record, Ahmed was not, as one colleague likes to say, your typical "double-hard war bastard".

He was perhaps the silliest war hero you will ever get to meet, cracking corny jokes with that same "SpongeBob" smile, no matter how miserable the situation was.

"What's there to eat?" Ahmed would always ask me before licking his lips, grabbing my gut and shouting: "Ayman! Ayman is delicious."

Just on Thursday, I needed a cigarette lighter and went to Ahmed.

He pulled out a stack of 10 held together by a rubber band. "Now I don't have so many, so the price is high," he said. "I'll give you the blue one for 1,000 dollars."

"Sure, Ahmed," I told him. "I'll bring the money tomorrow."

"For tomorrow, the price is 2,000 dollars," he responded. I agreed.

It's a debt I'll never get to pay.

A Child Has Been Killed. NEWSWEEK MAGAZINE

The doctor covers his ears, my hands begin to shake, and we drop toward the floor. Interview interrupted. Shells are falling directly on the town of Khan Assobl, and war roars through the once tidy calm of a rural home.

Khan Assobl is one place among many. A rough-hewn northern Syrian town in a rustic province called Idlib. As Syria moved beyond revolution to stagnated civil war, this old landscape of flinty crests and gnarled trees was put toward new use, excavated by both civilians and rebel soldiers for underground protection from aerial bombardment and shelling from the nearby Syrian Army outposts. If there was a time when war might have passed through Khan Assobl, the territory claimed by one side or another, that is over. Now the war never leaves. Rebels lob artillery into government positions, and the regime strikes at everything it can—mostly civilian areas like Khan Assobl.

Dr. Safah begins to stand; the initial shell shock fades, and duty kicks in. Someone could be hurt out there. Mahmood, the ambulance driver, is already out the door. Steady shellfire goes on as he rushes toward his vehicle, through ashen smoke, blasted earth, and the smell of freshly shattered stone. The engine sputters to a start on shabbily refined petrol. Lights flash, sirens howl, and the sayyarat issaaf—"car of the emergency"—shifts into motion, its rear sliding door still open.

"When we go on a mission, we expect to die," says Mahmood. "It is a good death. Yes, a good death, because I face death to help people."

Dr. Safah and I follow Mahmood's ambulance, driving toward the place where we think the shells have struck. We swerve past potholes on country roads altered by war's presence. The past is here. Signs point toward the Ebla ruins, the Idleb Hotel, camping sites. They are echoes of a life before the war. The present is here too. Bullet holes fill road signs, their jagged edges rusted with the passing of time. In quieter hours, country boys running errands on horses touch their heads when you pass, and old men herding sheep raise their staffs and greet you with the old Ottoman word "Effendi."

We reach flat, parched grass on the road's edge, and I look to Dr. Safah. He is a big, bull-like man, whose broad shoulders, heavy hands, and long Sunni beard are offset by kind eyes that fill with tears each time a child is killed.

A child has been killed. When we reach a Chinese-made pickup truck near where the shells landed, we see him. His name was Hussein Safah. He was 6 years old.

We find Hussein on the back of the pickup, placed by neighbors to take him to the cemetery field. His skull is broken and hollow. His body has been split in half. A knot of men in baseball caps look sullenly on, their hands on their hips, their heads held low. Just minutes earlier, the boy had been playing in his garden nearby. Now there is blood on the wall, a single shoe, and the smell of explosives.

Wrapped in a cheap rug, Hussein is being lowered into one of a dozen open graves that the people of Khan Assobl keep ready for their family, neighbors, and friends. He is buried quickly so that his mother doesn't have to see him this way. There is another reason there will be no funeral: the regime bombs funerals—they kill more people that way.

Government-ordered indiscriminate shelling. It means that day after day, civilians have become unwitting players in a conflict that was not theirs, victims of a kind of collective punishment by a regime targeting its own citizens. I've seen war before, but I don't understand this strategy. Citadels of government force lie surrounded by valleys of a rebel population, both martial and innocent. Rebels fire crude artillery toward encircled regime military bases. When the regime fires back, it is erratic, aimed at nothing but people, whoever they may be.

Amid talk of chemical weapons, red lines, and jihadis, what is forgotten is the fact that the largest numbers of Syrians being killed are people outside combat, in their gardens, in small towns like this one. We are now in the third year of bloodshed. There have been 93,000 killed, according to the United Nations; as many as 120,000, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The truth is, we don't know how many, because there are so many, most of them civilians.

"Syrians have just become numbers," Dr. Safah says.

But the numbers have names. Hussein is one. Killed by a single shell, one of 40, another number, dropped on this rural place one afternoon, a quantity utterly insignificant in the wreckage. How many more numbers will there be? Syrians already know the answer. "Mu muhem," says Mahmood. It does not matter. "We are alone."

IT WAS my third trip to Syria since the war began, and it started with a hard crossing. Days earlier, twin car bombs had devastated the Turkish border town of Reyhanli, killing at least 50, blurring the boundaries of Syria's expanding war, and temporarily shutting down border posts. The only way to enter Syria's vast northwestern province of Idlib was illegally, through a local smuggler. Abu Abdu was his name, and he grabbed the straps of my heavy bag when the Turkish Jandarma border guard chased us through a muddy field with his rifle drawn. In the forbidden military zone on the Turkish side of the border, we leaped over a mound of earth, our fall broken by swampy water, before we clambered up toward the wire. Barbed knots ripped my jeans and Abu Abdu's hands as he held apart a hole for us to crawl through.

"Burada tamam abi," Abu Abdu called to the Turkish border guard, 20 steps away, once we reached the other side. "We're fine here, brother." Syria. Your jurisdiction has just ended. The Turk raised his gun and kept us in his sights as we walked away. I hoped that boredom, malice, and the failure of his sweaty run wouldn't lead him to move his finger.

I meet Mahmood, the ambulance driver, in a breeze-block bungalow. He is 28 years old, with striking green eyes, curly hair, and a handsome face that could be on television. He's layering the walls with concrete as part of a three-man crew; a radio hangs perpetually by his side, waiting for a call. It is the lifeline between the injured and the local man they depend on, their courier, their neighbor, and their friend. His ambulance, parked yards away, is under the cover of a blue tarpaulin to obscure it from regime aircraft, which deliberately target ambulances, doctors, and hospitals—when they bother to target anything at all. Behind us, the minaret from Khan Assobl's mosque stands perilously erect, chewed apart by tank fire—a broken monument to a once peaceful place now under siege.

Khan Assobl is known for its quality stone—arsali and abdini—and like most men in town, Mahmood works in construction, his skills more recently employed to dig makeshift shelters and reinforce homes. His duty as the ambulance driver for 10 villages in the area is unpaid, as are the duties of the other volunteers of the medical coordination committee—a physiotherapist, two pharmacists, a nurse, and the local imam, who learned basic medicine during a 23-year prison sentence for anti-government activities in the Muslim Brotherhood. They are simple men, religious, set apart from their rural neighbors by some education and a belief in the duty to help those around them. When the revolution started, Mahmood joined demonstrations and then the Free Syrian Army, until he found his calling as an ambulance driver. He said there were thousands of fighters but only one driver, and that solitary vocation gave him a sense of purpose.

Life here is punctuated by the pounding thuds of falling shells that come without warning. Their timings are irregular, to increase the chances of casualty or death. Your first warning is the first explosion. If you're lucky, it will have fallen far, giving you plenty of time to find shelter. If you are unlucky, you are killed where you stand. If your condition is too critical to be treated in the crude clinics inside rebel territory, you're taken to the Turkish border in the back of Mahmood's ambulance, where indifferent border guards and security parameters may or may not let you through.

"They are pushing people to hate the Free Syrian Army. It is punishment for supporting the revolution," says Mahmood.

They are failing. People do not hate the war, the revolutionaries, or their Islamist mujahedin allies. They hate the regime. They hate Iran. They hate Hezbollah. They hate the Shia. And they hate America for standing by and allowing this to happen. Innocents who might have been, for want of better terms, moderate have become polarized. And Mahmood sees them daily as he races toward the bombing sites, watching the regime's brutality hardening face after face.

Mahmood helps, but he is also a symbol to both sides. "The ambulance makes the regime angry—because it shells people to kill them, and the ambulance saves their souls."

In January Mahmood found himself on the front line at the rebel-encircled military base of Wadi al-Deif, 15 kilometers from his home. An unconscious Libyan fighter for the Free Syrian Army was in the back of the ambulance, his leg blown off from shelling. After a close call with falling rockets near the front, Mahmood was on his way to the Turkish border crossing when a helicopter gunship began tailing them, unleashing staccato bursts of machine-gun fire across rocky hills. Mahmood swerved off the road and into a copse of trees, shielding the ambulance from the helicopter's vision. For two hours, they waited, while the Libyan bled, before the gunship finally gave up the hunt and Mahmood was able to continue on toward Turkey. His patient survived.

But Mahmood's benevolence had been damaged. Asked whether he would pick up a wounded regime solider in his ambulance, Mahmood says yes: "Just to let him die."

THE DESIRE to live a normal life is strong in Khan Assobl. Stores are still open, crops are harvested, and the call to prayer continues to bring out the faithful. Still, the fear of death from above does not abate. Planes and helicopters circle above, and the thuds of shells echo across concrete buildings and stone quarries every day. This year, out of the town's remaining population of about 6,000, nearly 30 have been killed from shelling. Nearby, in the ruined city of Maaret al-Numan, the figures are much higher. Locals say that 10 percent of the town's population has been killed by artillery bombardment.

"One little shell is still a lot. It can kill a whole family," says Dr. Safah.

And so the quest for normalcy has driven many here, literally, underground. Mahmood takes me to meet Abu Alaa. Abu Alaa's neighbors called him crazy when he started digging in his garden 18 months ago. Each day with a hammer and chisel he chipped away at the hard, thick stone in the ground outside his home. First for a few hours a day, then whole days, his strange behavior straining his relationship with his family after he enlisted his 13- and 15-year-old sons to take shifts burrowing deep into the earth. The town was still under the control of the regime Army at the time. Clashes at the Syrian Army checkpoint meters from his house had left him plagued with a dark, dreadful vision of the terror to come.

"I know what the regime is. I expected that they would use everything to kill people," he says.

When the shelling started last year, it gave meaning to his fears and conviction to his focus: shelter. Abu Alaa and his boys began to dig faster. After an entire year of dust, broken rock, and hammering, he had completed his task: a cavernous bomb bunker to protect his family from the horrors he had believed would come.

"They don't call me crazy anymore; now all the other people are crazy," he says in a voice that lingers with the grave lilt of the town stoner, an impression amplified by his hand-rolled tobacco, self-whittled cigarette holders, and lateral thinking. A stone staircase leads underground, and Scooby-Doo plays on the television in the subterranean living room. Cushions line the cool floor. There is a mantelpiece for the telephone and a deeper bedroom in the back for when the planes and helicopters circle overhead. Abu Alaa's family's life has been transplanted beneath the rock of his one-story concrete home above.

"What is this, the Four Seasons?" says a friend of Mahmood's as we are led into Abu Alaa's cave. We sit to drink coffee, roll cigarettes, and admire the work. The pops and thuds of artillery are a strange comfort. They are a reminder of what has been built with this cave: protection. "I have made my sons safe," Abu Alaa says. "I am very happy."

Many others in town have followed Abu Alaa's example and begun living in freshly dug caves. If they have the time, money, or familial manpower, they can create a space that seems like a home, endowed with electricity, telephones, televisions, and soft bedding. If not, at least they have a place to hide when the shells fall. Across Khan Assobl, a bulldozer can be seen making holes, sculpting stone to provide makeshift shelter. Abu Bilal, a once prosperous man, built his family's cave after he was unable to continue living in his home. A regime airstrike killed his neighbors, damaged his house, and cost his son his leg. The family now spends most of their time in their shelter below the shell of their former house, a cave masquerading as a home. "Civilized people fly to the moon, and we Syrians go underneath the ground."

Darkness falls on Khan Assobl. We are in Mahmood's house for dinner alongside Dr. Safah. Mahmood's five children scramble over his prone frame, eating cherries after a fine hefty dinner of meze, lamb, and liver kebabs. This war, filthy as it is, has not yet shattered the grace of heartfelt Syrian hospitality. Dr. Safah tells the story of Waji Abdullah over iced coffee that Mahmood learned to make when working as a laborer in Greece. It is one of a thousand similar tales in a place where war stories have become daily dinnertime conversation. Waji, 60, had been visiting the neighboring village when a rebel ambush struck a regime truck carrying a battery of Grad rockets with rocket-propelled grenades. The operation was a success, and the truck ignited, launching stray rockets erratically across the countryside. Waji, who had spent 15 hard years in prison for suspected anti-government activity under the rule of Hafez al-Assad, President Bashar al-Assad's father, was petrified. He ran the eight kilometers home as fast as his old legs would carry him. Later that night, he died, apparently from fear and exhaustion.

When the first shell of the night drops, Mahmood's youngest girl, 2 years old, looks around the room for assurance with two wide eyes, one crimson red from shrapnel damage when a tank round tore through Mahmood's home last year.

"There is no problem," says Mahmood. "It's ours, going to Qarmid," a Syrian Army base a dozen kilometers from Khan Assobl.

"But they will fire back," says Dr. Safah.

Dark smoke rises above the Qarmid brick factory, and Mahmood's radio crackles. "Shtaallit il nar, shtaallit il nar, shtaallit il nar." They've started a fire.

Fire back the regime does. The response is furious, again the relentless collective punishment. Under a mosquito net in the home of Mahmood's cousin, I lie awake at night, hearing the shells fall closer. The television, showing the pro-revolution Orient channel, flickers images of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's speeches amid a montage of murderous government acts; it is set over the theme of HBO's Band of Brothers—"How many more times can we condemn them ... We are deeply concerned ... Such violence is unacceptable"—until the television turns off. I lost count of the shells that night. A friend later tells me he stopped counting at 150.

Morning. Mahmood gets the kind of ordinary call any ambulance driver might get and, yet, a call he was not expecting. A pregnant woman has gone into early labor; the shelling could not have helped. I drive to meet Mahmood at a field hospital with the graffiti "Your clean hands and noble hearts produce new life" scrawled on a wall. There is another doctor here; as we talk, another interview interrupted by shelling. And another little boy, bloodied, to be carried in someone's arms.

"The shelling is daily and random," the doctor says, asking that he and the hospital remain nameless, out of fear of targeted regime airstrikes to kill him and his patients. He takes long heavy drags from the cigarette between his thumb and middle finger. He laughs, "I only smoke after shelling. And before. I smoke 30 a day."

A Child Called Tragedy Al JAZEERA AMERICA

SINJAR, Iraq — Khodeda Abbas is one of the saved. His wife went into labor coming off the mountain and needed medical assistance right away. The couple had just arrived at a shabby medical tent 20 kilometers from Mount Sinjar, along with hundreds of other refugees rescued in tractors, buses and cattle trucks. The drivers were all volunteers, men with enough gasoline and empathy to cross the desert and take exhausted strangers from Iraq into Syria over a border made only of dust. The tent had run out of medical supplies three days earlier.

It was here that Abbas smoked the best cigarette of his life, he said, after becoming a father to the sleeping baby in the milk crate by his feet. He named the child Farman. “It means ‘the tragedy,’” he said, “to remind him of where he came from.”

The tragedy in question began nine nights earlier, on Aug. 3. News of it arrived through the screams of the neighbor banging on Abbas’s door in the village of Siba Sheikh Khidr, on the outskirts of Sinjar town in northwestern Iraq: “Peshmerga have left. Daash are coming.” (Peshmerga are Kurdish security forces; Daash refers to the Islamic State, or IS — the armed Sunni fighters who are seeking to establish an independent state crossing the current borders of Iraq and Syria.)

In recent weeks, IS forces have advanced deeper into Syria and overtaken cities in northern Iraq, killing, imprisoning and evicting those who don’t submit to their cause. Kurdish forces in both countries have also been taking advantage of the current chaos to expand their territories. Here, the border between northwestern Iraq and northeastern Syria has effectively disappeared. Alliances are shifting and national identities are being discarded; many are turning to those they fear the least.

That night in Siba Sheikh Khidr, Abbas said, he grabbed his Kalashnikov rifle and told his wife to get ready in case she had to leave without him. There were reasons to be fearful. Like most of his neighbors, Abbas is Yazidi. Followers of the ancient pre-Islamic religion, an estimated 700,000 globally, hold a special veneration for a fallen angel, Melek Taus, whose remorseful tears, they say, extinguished the fires of hell and brought the angel back to God. IS fighters and others call Melek Taus "Satan" and Yazidis “devil worshippers.” The Yazidis, like many minorities in the Middle East, have long lived near mountains, seeking safety in their remoteness.

The cell-phone network was overloaded, so Abbas ran to his brother’s house and told him to gather as many men as he could. According to interviews with four survivors, perhaps 1,000 men — butchers, bakers, carpenters, young and old, most of them civilians — assembled near the military checkpoint in Siba Sheikh Khidr to form the only line of defense between IS and the city of Sinjar. Most of the Iraqi and peshmerga security forces that guarded the checkpoint in Siba Sheikh Khidr had fled, survivors said. The only ones who remained were Yazidi.

Abbas, a soldier in the Iraqi Army, and his brother, a member of the federal police, were among them. “We have to build a wall between Daash and Sinjar,” Abbas told his brother, the two of them filling empty rice sacks with stones, which they then used to barricade the road to town.

Of all the bombings in Iraq this past decade, Siba Sheikh Khidr had seen the worst. In 2007, multiple suicide truck bombs killed more than 500 people there in what is considered to be the singe deadliest attack of the Iraq War. After the attack, the Iraqi government constructed a dirt berm perimeter to protect the town, making the only passage to the heartland of the Yazidis a single road. That night, Abbas and the others took positions on the berm around that road, waiting for the IS convoy to arrive.

The IS fighters came in pickup trucks at first — more than 20, survivors said, each mounted with a Soviet-era machine gun known as the dushka. Like many Iraqi civilians, the people of Siba Sheikh Khidr kept Kalashnikovs in their homes for protection. That night, the villagers used them to fire on the incoming Daash convoy, forcing it off the road.

When, after three hours of clashes, Daash pickup trucks failed to break through the Yazidis’ defenses, fighters in Siba Sheikh Khidr said they saw four U.S.-made Humvees driving toward them from the direction of the Syrian border. The armored vehicles had likely fallen into IS hands in June, when the Sunni fighters overran Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. “The Humvees ran over our barricade and opened the road for the pickup trucks,” said Faisal Qassim, one of the survivors. “Without the Humvees, we could have stopped them.”

By 8 a.m., after five hours of fighting, the Battle of Sinjar was lost. With no military assistance from Iraq’s central or Kurdish governments, the Yazidis had failed to hold the road and prevent Sinjar from falling to the Islamic State. They had, however, bought their brethren precious time to prepare an evacuation. As the Humvees drove past the barricades and on to Sinjar, Abbas said, survivors from the battle gathered their families and fled. The only way out was up and over Mount Sinjar, a mountain range more than 60 miles long and almost 5,000 feet high.

Tens of thousands of Yazidis would be stranded in there in the coming days, surrounded by IS fighters and facing death from malnutrition, dehydration and exposure. On Aug. 8, the United States launched airstrikes to repel IS forces and dropped pallets of food and water. But it was a group of Syrian Kurdish fighters known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, who fought through IS-controlled territory in Syria to establish a safe corridor to rescue many of the Yazidis from the mountain. The YPG fighters are the Syrian brand of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK, which has been designated a terrorist group by the United States. They are seeking to establish an independent Kurdish state in northeastern Syria.

The civil war that has fractured since Syria since 2011 has provided the YPG an opportunity to dramatically expand its territory. The only problem, however, has been that the borders of a new independent Syrian Kurdish “Rojava” — or “West” in Kurdish — are now being challenged by another opportunistic organization also trying to carve out a country from the wreckage of Syria’s civil war: IS. By August of last year, the YPG and IS were at war with one another.

Abbas and other Yazidis who were assisted by the YPG are now shifting their allegiance to the group. Since coming off the mountain, hundreds of Yazidi have received training at YPG military training camps; some have already returned to Mount Sinjar to fight as new recruits for the YPG. “I belong to the YPG because they were the only ones who would protect us,” Abbas said. “From this moment, I am not Iraqi.” In the great plains and highlands of a part of the Middle East once known by the Arabic name Jazira, citizenship, for Abbas and many others, has become a choice forced upon them by armed groups attempting to carve out new ethno-national states.

In Qamishli, a city in northeastern Syria, an armed man stopped our car. He was clean shaven and wearing the camouflaged uniform of the Syrian regime. “Don’t speak,” said Bahjat Muhammad, the driver, before rolling down the window. The city is home to the headquarters of the YPG, but also to the only checkpoints in the area still under the control of President Bashar al-Assad's Syria.

At checkpoints across the Middle East, a password exists that can take one safely through to the other side. Said forcefully enough, it will confirm one’s identity better than any badge, stamp or signature on a piece of paper. In Baghdad, the password is “As’aib,” for Asaib Ahl al-Haq, a Shia death squad with total government impunity. In Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, the word is “Hezbollah.” In Qamishli, that password is “guerrilla.” Translation: “I’m with the PKK. Get the f--- out of my way.” The men at the regime checkpoint stepped back, waving us through.

“Allowing the regime to stay is useful,” said Ayman Mizowaya, an officer in the Asaish, the YPG’s intelligence agency, when explaining the contradictions of competing statehood in a city where a 15-foot statue of Hafez al-Assad, father of the current president and the Syrian leader for three decades, is watched over by the smiling faces of female fighters on YPG recruitment posters. On a recent visit to his office, he told me to listen. I didn’t hear anything. “Exactly,” he said. In Qamishli, “there is no bombing or shelling.” The regime’s presence is a symbol of tacit cooperation between the YPG and the Syrian regime. It helps maintain stability in Qamashli, deterring threats to the YPG and allowing both the regime and the Syrian Kurdish fighters to focus their military attention on other factions in Syria’s civil war, including IS.

Although the YPG promises to bring a radically new kind of state to the Middle East, its offices looked just like those of any other regime in the region, down to the pink plastic flowers visitors stare at while awaiting the bureaucratic approvals that punctuate life across this region. As an employee of the Asaish since last year, Mizowaya is a supporter of the Kurdish struggle for independence. Yet he is an Assyrian Christian, not a Kurd.

An increasing number of Assyrian Christians in northeastern Syria are, like Mizowaya, joining the YPG. Mizowaya said that IS fighters would likely execute him if he failed to convert to Islam and that the Syrian regime as just as capable of brutality. Meanwhile, he said, there are no longer any moderate Syrian rebels left in the area to join. “We have to choose one side,” Mizowaya said, and “the Kurds are who I fear the least.”

It’s a sentiment felt by members of most groups living across the Syrian-Iraqi borderlands with the important exception of one: Iraqi Sunni Muslim Arabs.

On Aug. 7, the day before the United States launched airstrikes to stop the advance of IS forces on the Iraqi Kurdish capital of Erbil, a white BMW drove toward the city from the Nineveh plains. The plains had just fallen to IS fighters, bringing the Sunni forces within 25 miles of the political and economic heart of Iraqi Kurdistan. Like other vehicles fleeing IS forces, the car slowed to a stop at a checkpoint near hundreds of Kurdish peshmerga militiamen who were scrambling to set up a line of defense.

Religion is clearly stated on Iraqi identification cards and many of those fleeing the Nineveh plains were card-carrying Christians — but not all. Peshmerga at the checkpoint asked for IDs, often waving vehicles through in a matter of seconds. There was, however, some sort of problem with the BMW.

The driver, who looked about 60, was dragged out of the car’s open window and punched in the face. An angry crowd of peshmerga and volunteers gathered around him, pushing him onto the road and kicking him while he lay on the ground. They opened the BMW’s trunk to search it and found it was empty — until, that is, they threw the bleeding driver inside and drove away. “He’s Daash,” said one man in civilian clothes, by way of explanation. The proof? “He’s Arab.”

Before the Battle of Sinjar, IS had only managed to conquer parts of Iraq with a significant Sunni Arab population. It had done so by capitalizing on the grievances of Iraq’s Sunnis. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Sunnis were sidelined and purged from positions of power by Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s Shia prime minister for eight years until he agreed to relinquish power this month. His government has also been accused of systematically targeting, imprisoning and torturing tens of thousands of Sunni men and women.

And, in recent months, the Maliki government has sanctioned the re-emergence of armed Shia militias on the streets of Iraq, providing them with government badges and the authority to kill. Last Friday, during prayer time in a Sunni mosque in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad, suspected Shia militiamen fired on Sunni worshippers, killing more than 70 people. By the time IS fighters began seizing cities from the control of Baghdad’s Shia-dominated government, Sunnis across Iraq were referring to them as “the revolutionaries.”

Abu Hamoudi is among those Sunnis who’ve turned their support to IS. Of the five competing states now fighting to establish territory in northern Iraq and eastern Syria — two internationally recognized (Iraq and Syria), two Kurdish (YPG and Iraqi Kurdistan), and one Sunni (IS) — the latter is the most elusive. But reached by phone on a recent August day, Hamoudi, now the Islamic State’s emir in Mosul’s eastern Al Zahra quarter, started asking questions before I could ask my own.

“Why, when the Christians left Mosul, all the media talked about them?” he said. “And nowadays they are all talking about Yazidis and Sinjar. Why didn’t they talk about Anbar and Fallujah? Why didn’t the media concentrate on them? Why? Because they are Sunnis? Why didn’t they make the Sunni case important?”

Hamoudi started to run through a long list of grievances against the media, the United States and Maliki. Like many local leaders in the IS ranks, Abu Hamoudi is a former prisoner. He said he was imprisoned and tortured under Maliki’s rule, targeted for being a former Baathist officer in Saddam Hussein’s army. There, in Mosul’s Badush prison, he said, a Shia prison guard called Jasim, nicknamed the monster, beat him regularly, eventually fracturing his spine. The product of a time that predates Al Qaeda and IS, Hamoudi did not speak the language of religious dogma. His words were more grounded in the language of Sunni supremacism. And they offered, with brutal simplicity, the Islamic State’s solution to a multiethnic Iraq: submit or be extinguished.

“The Islamic State has gotten rid of sectarianism,” he said. “Now there are no Shia. There are no Kurds … no Shabak, no Yazidi, no Christian. And we are all Sunni.”