This time, the Daesh were not putting up much of a fight, at least not with small arms fire. They abandoned Zanghar and by 6:40 a.m., the village had been liberated. Ground troops were swarming into the village. Just before I got there, an IED went off and killed a Peshmerga fighter. One of his teammates showed me the video on his cell phone of a bulldozer trying to recover his body, which had been cut in half by the blast.

The sun was coming up and the haze began to clear. With Zanghar captured, the fighting column crept forward. Peshmerga EOD teams were digging up and disarming IEDs all along the road. Sadly, the Kurdish EOD experts had little to work with besides a piece of string and a fishhook. An ambulance blaring its siren came blasting by me, picking up the wounded as IEDs were tripped and exploded prematurely.

Around this time, someone’s toy airplane started buzzing overhead. A UAV, watching us from above.