While it has been repoted that the United States will provide the Kurdish army – commonly known as the peshmerga – with small arms and ammunition, there have been repeated calls to more substantially arm the paramilitary force to the teeth. On the August 12 edition of CNN Newsroom, host Carol Costello discussed the subject with Haras Rafiq, an outreach officer for the Quilliam Foundation, a think tank that challenges Islamic extremism.
Costello was skeptical that doing anything to assist the Kurds against ISIS in northern Iraq would help the cause. Rafiq argued that “heavy artillery” and “heavy ammunition,” along with possible training of ISIS forces, would be necessary to repel ISIS. Costello doubted that these options would be effective.