They pound away with heavy artillery and rocket fire, advancing in armoured vehicles and showing no mercy for their adversaries. Wherever Islamic State militants appear, the situation turns bad quickly.
Lightning-quick, the extremists in early June captured the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Instead of fighting back, Iraqi government soldiers fled.
Even as Kurdish Peshmerga fighters continue put up fierce, bloody resistance, Islamic State militants have continued to raise their black flags in a number of northern Iraqi towns.
The Kurds, who have their own semi-autonomous region in Iraq, are considered disciplined, well organised and highly motivated.
But their roughly 25,000 fighters are mainly armed with only light and older weapons, most dating back to that of former army dictator Saddam Hussein.
The Kurds also have Russian-made AK-47 assault rifles and some machine guns. But they scarcely have any armour-piercing weapons, according to military expert James Dubik of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) in Washington.
When the extremists launched their offensive in northern Iraq two weeks ago, they fired artillery at the Kurds, who had nothing on their side to respond with.
The Islamic State fighters advanced in armoured Humvees, the all-terrain vehicles that the US had supplied to the Iraqi army. When they fled, the Iraqi soldiers simply abandoned the vehicles. Dubik estimates that the jihadists now have several hundred Humvees.
With each further military success, the terror group is gaining new fighters – above all young men eager to join.
Even with weapons shipments from abroad, the Kurds would still scarcely be able to push the jihadists back.
“If they are equipped, the Kurds are able to defend their own territory,” Dubik says. “But they do not have the strength in numbers and military capability to launch a large-scale counter-offensive.”
Dubik says the Iraq army has battle-hardened anti-terrorism units of several thousand men. But outgoing Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had refrained from ordering those forces to head to northern Iraq.
Dubik, himself a former US general who was involved in training Iraqi soldiers, says these units must be deployed there.
But recapturing the terrority will be an uphill battle. “We didn’t teach them this,” Dubik says. Therefore, foreign military advisors and air support are urgently needed.
GNA
PDC
