MOSUL DAM, Iraq — Near the Mosul Dam, at the foot of a mountain only 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) from the battle raging between the peshmerga forces and the Islamic State (IS), Kurdistan Regional Government President Massoud Barzani leads the battle from a simple caravan that is the closest point a military commander could get to his soldiers.

Barzani has left his political tasks in Erbil for the government to handle and decided to join the battle. His visitors are advised to wear heavy clothing, given the absence of a heating system at the Kurdish leader’s new headquarters. Barzani’s escorts told Al-Monitor that he was used to the cold since he hails from that environment. Barzani and his father, Mullah Mustafa Barzani, the leader of the Kurdish revolutionary movement, lived more difficult conditions in the remote mountains of northern Iraq when they led the fight against the regime of Saddam Hussein.

The geographical overlap is obvious in the northern area of Mosul, where the Mosul Dam is located, which was liberated in August 2014 by the peshmerga forces with the support of the international coalition air force. Peshmerga fighters provide their visitors with a telescope to watch the movement of IS fighters in villages sheltered by the mountains, the Tigris River and the vast farmland that allows them to move and create overlapping demarcation lines.

While he pointed out the movement of IS fighters at the bottom of a mountain, a peshmerga leader in the Mosul Dam area told Al-Monitor, “Complete victory over IS is possible in Mosul, but the difficulty lies in protecting the land once liberated. When the peshmerga forces liberated land that IS had seized over the past months, they had to rely on local landowners to protect the land, which was sufficient to provide human capacity and military capabilities to advance to new areas. However, expanding that area requires more preparations on the ground.”