This post will be more about the who the Peshmerga are, which has motivated me to help in any way that I can. After hearing my fathers first story, I was very interested in learning more about the Peshmerga. In November 2015, I had a great opportunity to interview another responder, Hope, for my paper on the Peshmerga. Hope had been in the Iraq in January of 2014 and then from January 2015-June 2015. I asked her a question about what she experienced to be a cause of unity and identity to the Kurdish people. The following is a quote about her experience of the Peshmerga during that time. “The Peshmerga is one of the most unifying factors that brings everyone together. They [the Kurdish people] love their Peshmerga and it is an honor to be one of them. They are “of the people” because most of them are regular people who left their homes and families and are now fighting for little or no pay in defense of their people. Everywhere you went their would be signs, flags, posters, saying “we are all Peshmerga”. I couldn’t understand most of the words on the songs in the stores or on the radio, but I did know the word Peshmerga and almost every song had something to do with praising the Peshmerga. The Kurdish people take pride in the fact that they have survived as a people even though so many have tried to wipe them out. They also want to be known as a people that keep their word, probably because they have been betrayed by other countries so many times.”
The day before I present my paper, the New York Times ran this article, about how the Peshmerga, along with the US, is fighting ISIS. If you do happen to click the link I’d like to draw attention to the photos of female peshmerga fighters, who happen to also be frontline fighters from that article. Although my fathers accounts are of experiences with male soldiers, the Peshmerga are made up of both men and women.
The Re-foundation Project 