For the first time since its launch two years ago, an Assyrian defense force has met ISIS in a large battle in the Nineveh Plain north of Mosul. Approximately 200 Assyrian Christian fighters from the Nineveh Plains Protection Unit engaged ISIS and helped drive the attackers out of the Assyrian Christian village of Teleskof 15 km north of Mosul on May 2 and 3, according to Jeff Gardner, the chief of operations of the Restore Nineveh Now Foundation. The battle began with a surprise attack on Teleskof early in the morning of May 3 and involved more than 450 ISIS fighters, including approximately 50 men wearing suicide vests, according to Rudaw, a Kurdish news site. The fighting claimed the lives of 10 Peshmerga and a U.S. military advisor, Navy Seal Charles Keating IV as well as wounding 100 Peshmerga. After the initial attack, Nineveh Plains Protection Units (NPU) drove south from their base in Alqosh and engaged with ISIS for several hours until they withdrew north of the city due to lack of ammunition. U.S. military Apache helicopters peppered the ISIS positions with fire on the late afternoon of May 3 and continuing on May 4, causing most of the Jihadist casualties, Gardner told The Philos Project. When the fighting stopped May 4, more than 154 ISIS bodies were left on the grounds round the village. The NPU claimed to be the cause of three ISIS members dead and reported three of their own soldiers wounded, Gardner said. South of Kirkuk the Peshmerga and the Iraqi Army have pushed ISIS forces 35 km outside the perimeter of the Kirkuk oil fields, according to the top Kurdish general in the area. The city of Mosul, once Iraq's second-largest city, has steadily lost population during the last year as living conditions worsen and civilians flee the city every week. The city of two million has dwindled to between one million to 1.5 million, according to Gen. Muhsin Rashed, chief surgeon of the Kurdish Regional Army the Peshmerga. Cash-strapped Baghdad and the Kurdish regional government are hard-pressed to pay their soldiers due to the low price of oil during the last 18 months. Peshmerga have to wait four months for a paycheck. ISIS soldiers also are stressed by the cash crunch. Whereas the jihadist volunteers two years ago could expect at least $400 a month, a cell phone and a car, most are currently receiving only $50 a month now, and morale is at a low ebb, according to Mike Pregent, an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute in Washington. In the north of Iraq, the tension between the Kurdish Regional Army and the Iraqi Army is portentous. A case in point is the disparities in medical aid to the two forces. Muhsin, who serves on the General Staff for Medical Military affairs for the Kurdish regional army, calls for equitable sharing of first-aid equipment for soldiers on the frontlines. He says that anti-hemorrhaging kits are commonly distributed to Iraq Security forces and to tens of thousands of Shia militia that fight alongside the army, but are rare in Kurdistan. According to Muhsin, "More than 1500 Peshmerga have been killed in Northern Iraq since the ISIS invasion of 2014, and many of these deaths were due to battlefield injuries resulting in massive blood loss." He goes on to add that they "have requested emergency first-aid kits with compression bandages from the Central Government in Baghdad but so far, none have been delivered." Another sore point for the Peshmerga is that ISIS increasingly has used chemical weapons from which the Kurds have little protection. There have been nine chemical weapons attacks between Sinjar and Zumar since August of 2015, according to Muhsin. The most serious attacks were 38 mortar rounds armed with Mustard gas, wounding 50 Peshmerga on the Makhmour front during fighting Aug. 11-12. Of more than 160,000 Peshmerga defending an 800-km front line in Iraq, only about 2,500 soldiers are equipped with gas masks, and virtually none of them have chemical body suits, according to Muhsin. Meanwhile the Iraqi Army's 14,000 regular infantry based on the Makhmour Front south and east of Mosul are uniformly equipped with full sets of chemical suits, gas masks and anti-chemical injections, Rudaw reports. There is a stark contrast between ambulance fleets operated by Iraqi Security forces and those obtained by Pesherga, Muhsin said after attending a conference at Central Command in Tampa, Florida. "The Iraqi Army has 150 ambulances, according to their documentation at the conference; the whole Peshmerga forces have only 23 ambulances that are fully operational," Muhsin said. "There is a also a critical need for field hospitals and first-aid kits." Even while Kurdish and Arab soldiers fall in battle on the Nineveh Plains north of Mosul, a political battle rages in Baghdad. The high-pressure demonstrations in April of the radical Shia Sadrist faction led by Muqtada Sadr threaten to bring down the Central government. South of Kirk, pitched battles have broken out in late April in Tuz Khurmatu between Peshmerga and Shia militia over turf, even though both forces are assumed to be allies in the war against ISIS. The guns of war in Iraq grow louder as the dream of joining a mosaic of nationalities under the flag of the Republic of Iraq fades.