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“Some of them have 18 years of service in the peshmerga but they’ve never trained beyond marching and shooting,” Lieut. Walter said. “The rest they’ve learned by doing.”

Some of them have 18 years of service in the peshmerga but they’ve never trained beyond marching and shooting

With the international coalition fighting ISIS so far ruling out foreign ground troops, training local forces has emerged as one of the three main pillars of the campaign, alongside air strikes and embedding coalition soldiers in “advise and assist” roles. Coalition officials say that while the air strikes have been instrumental in halting the advance of ISIS and degrading its capabilities, its final defeat will be at the hands of these local forces.

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The peshmerga — fighters from the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq — have been at the forefront.

But for the coalition states trying to get them up to speed for battle, language barriers have been only one of many challenges.

A few days before the class, Lieut. Walter and the other instructors were wondering how many men they would be training. They were told to prepare for eight platoons, but two only arrived at the last minute and the last came two days late. The men had been fighting on the front line and had just a weekend at home before starting training.

Similarly, the instructors were unsure whether they would have enough ammunition to train the men effectively. With bullets being in demand at the front, Lt.-Col. Jurgen Bredtmann, the German liaison officer, said they had to argue for more ammunition, which was “drip fed” day by day.