This part of the base is home to a battalion of explosive ordnance demolition — or EOD — troops belonging to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK.

The battalion consists of around 250 men, but only a few work on the base. The rest serve with teams up and down the front line, from Jalawla and the border with Iran to the front line in Kirkuk.

There’s a common misconception in the Western media that the Peshmerga is a unified force. The reality is that the majority of Kurdish fighters are loyal to their respective political parties. There’s PUK Peshmerga in eastern Iraq, and Peshmerga loyal to the Kurdish Democratic Party — or KDP — in the west.

Around 30 percent of the Kurdistan region’s fighting force comes directly under the Ministry of Peshmerga. A sister EOD unit, with whom these engineers have very little contact, does the same job along the KDP part of the front line.

While visiting the base, one EOD team was preparing to leave — some troops discovered a bomb. It’s too dangerous to go with them, because there’s sniper in the area.

“Some days we have 10 to 15 IEDs, then sometimes nothing for days,” Lt. Mohamed Abdulsat, a Peshmerga engineer, says before leaving. “Do you have your body armor?” Lt. Col. Fakhratin Najmadin, the commanding officer of the EOD unit, asks Mohamed. The lieutenant reassures him that he does while walking off to his vehicle.

This isn’t the first call of the day. In the morning, the unit dealt with two devices in an area near Kirkuk, where the Peshmerga are constructing a new defensive berm. “ISIS saw this and laid IEDs to try and catch the digger drivers,” Fakhratin explains.

The colonel swipes across the screen of his smartphone, showing footage of one of the devices blowing up in a controlled explosion. “Many parts of this area were held by ISIS, so they know the roads and back ways,” Fakhratin says.

It wasn’t always like this. Before Islamic State invaded in 2014, Iraqi Kurdistan saw very little in the way of IEDs. “Before ISIS, we just trained, there were no IEDs,” says Bakhtiar Mahmood, a Peshmerga engineer of seven years.

Bakhtiar grew up in Kaladze, close to the Iranian border and home to many large minefields — remnants of the Iran-Iraq War. I want to know why he chose this line of work.

“Bombs are a big matter and you can save many lives,” he replies.

Bakhtiar estimates that he has destroyed 250 IEDs and diffused another 200 since the conflict began. Conferring with the colonel, he estimates that there could be another 5,000 to 7,000 bombs in the area that the unit will have to deal with eventually.