Unprecedented Kurdish peshmerga deployment in Iraq

The onslaught by Sunni Arab militants in northern Iraq has prompted the country's Kurds to deploy the famed peshmerga security forces in defence of their autonomous region.

The move affects both young and old, with regional President Massud Barzani even calling on retired fighters to volunteer to take up arms again.

At a peshmerga base outside Arbil, the capital of the three-province Kurdistan region, training has a new urgency.

Young men dressed in green fatigues are put through their paces on an assault course, swinging from monkey bars, shimmying down ropes and scrambling over walls daubed in camouflage colours.

They will graduate as the region faces what the secretary general of the ministry responsible for the peshmerga says is a major military challenge - tackling the insurgents, led by jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), who have seized a large chunk of the neighbouring territory.

"We're talking about facing terrorists along a piece of territory that extends 1,500 kilometres," Jabbar Yawar said.

The peshmerga are famed for their devotion to the Kurdish nationalist cause and their long-running guerilla war against now-executed dictator Saddam Hussein's forces, and are regarded as well-trained, well-armed and capable.

The recruits go through a 45-day training programme, which includes physical exercise like kickboxing and assault courses, as well as weapons instruction.

When they graduate, they will face foes with recent battle experience in Syria and Iraq, as well as some former Iraqi soldiers with several wars under their belts.

As they train, retired peshmerga responding to Barzani's call arrive at the base.

They trundle in, many dressed in traditional baggy Kurdish shirts and trousers, bound around often rotund midsections with a patterned belt. Some 200 of them have answered the call in recent days, a peshmerga source says, swelling the 300 men in training.

"This is the biggest deployment of peshmerga in recent history," Yawar told AFP.

Previously, he said, some 13 brigades were deployed along with regular Iraqi soldiers along a 1,500-kilometre line from the Syrian border to the frontier with Iran.