650-mile trench stakes out claim for bigger Kurdish territory in Iraq
On the plains north and east of Mosul, far from the battle in the city centre, a new frontline is taking shape. Mounds of earth have been heaped above a trench gouged out of the ground along about 650 miles (1,050km) of northern Iraq, which before the war with Islamic State was in Arab hands. […]Martin Chulov writes for The Guardian:
On the plains north and east of Mosul, far from the battle in the city centre, a new frontline is taking shape. Mounds of earth have been heaped above a trench gouged out of the ground along about 650 miles (1,050km) of northern Iraq, which before the war with Islamic State was in Arab hands.
The berm runs from Sinjar, in the north-west, to Khanaqin, near the Iranian border, following the line of Kurdish military control. Woven into it are peshmerga positions, and on top flies the Kurdish flag, a clear statement of the Kurds’ hope that their role in fighting the war has already secured them a bigger slice of Iraq.
As Iraqi forces have pushed further into central Mosul over the past week, ousting Isis from the university and reaching the Tigris river that divides the city, the Kurds have been putting the finishing touches on what officials in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, call a military line that commandeers more land than they have ever had in the modern Iraqi state.
