On the Front Lines: Attorney returns home calling for more US support

It’s one thing to call for support of the troops fighting Islamic State members in northern Iraq. It’s something else to go there and help them directly.

The latter is exactly what Springfield attorney Tim Hayes of Bishop & Hayes PC did.

Hayes, who seven years ago served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, spent a week in late October with the Free Burma Rangers in Kurdistan. He assisted in training combat first aid to the peshmerga military forces defending northern Iraq’s Kurdistan region against the Islamic State. The humanitarian group also provided medical supplies and dental services to front-line fighters.

Hayes visited Kurdish soldiers near Ba’ashiqah and Bahzani while in the Erbil region of Kurdistan on high ground just outside of Mosul, Iraq, which is currently controlled by the Islamic State group, aka ISIS.

“I could see ISIS through my binoculars. I took pictures of the little flag they throw up and saw them moving around,” he said.

A longtime Army reservist who completed his service about two years ago, Hayes was able to teach Kurds on the front lines how to use combat-application tourniquets, which can be self-administered in the event enemy bullets or mortar shells hit their targets.

“About a year ago, I got my (emergency medical technician) license; it was something I wanted to do on the side,” said Hayes, an Evangel University graduate who works as a personal-injury lawyer. “It’s just bothered me to see the extraordinary suffering in that part of the world.”

The team with Free Burma Rangers – a service organization that supports ethnic pro-democracy groups by providing training and supplies in areas under attack – also visited a refugee camp on Mt. Sinjar. The needs are many, he said, and they delivered medical supplies and 20 soccer balls to the people displaced by the fighting.

“They don’t have teams of Navy corpsmen or combat medics like what we have in our military. They don’t have a lot of people to provide them first aid. Some of the soldiers I was with on the front lines were in their 70s and 80s,” he said. “The town of Erbil is a beautiful city with movie theaters and restaurants and looks like a smaller version of Kansas City, but about 40 miles away is ISIS-controlled territory with a front line, almost like trench warfare in World War I. I guess if ISIS was in Branson, we might have 70-year-olds on the front lines as well.”

Over the past year, he said teams of nearby Kurds – mostly younger men – have manned positions for 10 days, worked their day jobs for 20 days and returned to hold the line against an Islamic State offensive.

The son of an Assemblies of God preacher, Hayes said he now wants to encourage more Americans to become educated about the threat of ISIS.

“With more U.S. support, with more heavy weaponry, (the Kurds) would be able to push ISIS back even out of Mosul,” he said.

Hayes’ position is backed by peshmerga spokesman Brig. Gen. Hazhar Ismail, who called for more U.S. support in an opinion piece published Nov. 1 in Newsweek.

“To continue to succeed on the battlefield, the peshmerga need everything: from basic tactical gear like helmets, night vision binoculars and trauma medical packs to heavy assault equipment like tanks, armored personnel carriers and (guided) missiles,” he wrote, adding the forces there have regained about 95 percent of the territory they had lost to the Islamic State since August 2014. “When it comes time to liberate Mosul, the peshmerga will play a role alongside these other forces and the coalition.”

Hayes said the Kurdish leaders he met aren’t asking for the U.S. to fight their fight; they seek backing.

“They’re not asking for 10,000 U.S. troops. They just need more weapons and continued air support,” he said.

Hayes has reached out to Sen. Claire McCaskill’s office and plans to contact Sen. Roy Blunt’s office, as well, asking them to back aid for Kurdish forces on the front lines. Blunt, a Republican whose home office is in Springfield, introduced an amendment to the fiscal 2016 budget this spring that would provide aid to Kurdish forces in their fight against the Islamic State group. The senator serves on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense and the Select Committee on Intelligence.

“I support a strong, equipped, ready and trained Kurdish military that can defend itself and its people,” Blunt said in a statement to Springfield Business Journal. “While making some moderate gains against ISIS, the Kurds have yet to receive the level of the equipment they need to take and hold territory on the ground in Iraq.”

For Hayes, the threat of evil the Islamic State represents is real. In the communities they conquer, he understands Christians and Jews are given four choices: convert to Islam, flee, pay taxes as non-Muslims or accept beheading. Those not of an Abrahamic faith, such as the Yazidis, have been told to convert or die.

While in northern Iraq, he heard stories of rape and slavery – and bravery, too.

“Ideologically, I think this is the greatest evil we’ve faced since World War II,” Hayes said. “In America, we believe in a basic level of freedom. I have four daughters and one son, and that’s not the kind of world I would want them to grow up in.

“Our freedoms are so often taken for granted – and I’m including myself in that – until you see the way the rest of the world lives.”

Hayes, who connected with the Free Burma Rangers this year on a mission trip to Thailand, is considering a summertime return to Kurdistan.