ISIS Battle in Iraq Stalled by Ethnic and Religious Strife

As the sun sets over the front line in the Iraqi town of Makhmour, Sergeant Farsal Goran packs tobacco into a waterpipe. Behind him is the bare concrete building where he and his Kurdish comrades sleep in shifts. In front of him lie a wall of sandbags. Roughly a mile in the distance is a town held by ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria. Earlier in the day, his unit traded mortar fire with the ISIS fighters on the other side. Now the tension has eased.