SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq // Six months after ISIL first launched its offensive in Iraq, the country’s Kurds say that more than 700 of their fighters have been killed and that the burden of hosting a million displaced civilians is becoming unsustainable.
Since June 9, Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region has been involved in battles with ISIL along a front line stretching more than 1,000 kilometres.
A statement released on Wednesday by the region’s military forces, known as the peshmerga, said 727 members of the Kurdish security forces had been killed and 3,564 wounded since June 10.
The dead and wounded included “[peshmerga] officers, non-commissioned officers, members of the Asayish (intelligence agency), of the police and some peshmerga veterans,” it said.
Another 34 members of the security forces are still reported as missing.
The last overall toll released by an official Kurdish source was on August 8, when the regional presidency’s chief of staff, Fuad Hussein, said 150 peshmerga had been killed.
Wednesday’s figures do not include casualties sustained in Iraq by Kurdish fighters from armed groups based in Turkey, Syria and Iran who have also joined the anti-ISIL war effort.
Jabbar Yawar, the peshmerga ministry’s secretary general, said that only 11 of the Iraqi Kurds who joined the battle against ISIL fighters in the Syrian border town of Kobane had been wounded and none killed.
These latest casualty figures are dwarfed by the losses suffered by Iraq’s government forces, however, which are believed to be in the thousands.
When ISIL, which already controlled swathes of neighbouring Syria, attacked six months ago, government forces collapsed. Commanders and foot soldiers alike often abandoned their posts without a fight.
The peshmerga moved in to the vacuum, taking over several disputed areas they had long claimed from the state, and expanding the size of their region by around 40 per cent.
The Kurds were forced out of several of their newly acquired territories, however, when ISIL launched a second offensive in August.
The fresh advance brought ISIL to within striking distance of the Kurdish capital Erbil. This was then used as one of the justifications put forward by US President Barack Obama when he ordered air strikes on the region four months ago.
Several other nations, including the UK, France and Australia, have since joined the air campaign. The peshmerga have also received foreign assistance in the shape of weapons, military advisers and training.
“Peshmerga forces have succeeded in pushing IS away from several Kurdistan regions and in transitioning from a defensive to an offensive phase,” the peshmerga’s Wednesday’s statement said, referring to ISIL by its self-declared acronym.
The peshmerga have suffered heavy losses in and around Jalawla, a town near the Iranian border which has changed hands several times.
They were also involved in a fierce battle to retake the dam at Mosul, Iraq’s largest, and more recently in almost daily fighting south of the city Kirkuk.
Violence in Iraq has displaced more than two million people this year, with nearly half fleeing to the relative safety of the Kurdish region.
A statement from the UN and Kurdish government, also released on Wednesday, said that 946,266 displaced Iraqis had found refuge in the Kurdish region in 2014.
“The hosting of IDPs (internally displaced persons) in the Kurdistan region of Iraq is placing a huge burden both on the region’s social services.. (and) financial resources, which is becoming unsustainable,” Kurdish planning minister Ali Sindi said, referring to the Kurdish name for the autonomous region.
A year-long dispute with Baghdad over budget allocations and oil exports, which now looks set to be resolved, has drained Erbil’s coffers and the region is experiencing a bruising financial crunch.
*Agence France-Presse