Revenge thrives in Sinjar, city destroyed by jihadists

SINJAR, Iraq — Sulaiman Omar has not heard from his six brothers or their daughters since the day Islamic State came to town. The 37-year-old Yazidi fighter lost contact with them amid the jihadists’ onslaught on his home of Sinjar, Iraq, in August 2014.

Now, he believes, his brothers are likely dead and their daughters sold as sex slaves. As he walks amid the rubble of a city liberated, but in ruins, his anger turns to some of his former neighbours. “It doesn’t matter whether they’re Kurdish or Arab — if they’ve burnt our homes and kidnapped our women, we won’t forgive them,” he says.

As the jubilation for the liberation of Sinjar city melts away, brewing tensions between Yazidis and Sunnis are causing ripples of alarm among the residents of the eponymous district.

While civilians have yet to return in any number to the city, the Yazidis who venture onto the shattered roads of Sinjar to claim back what is left of their belongings say they do not wish for Sunni residents to come back to their homes. Reports of Sunni homes being ransacked by Yazidis are abundant.

The advance of extremist forces through Nineveh Province, in which Sinjar sits, saw the killing of thousands of Yazidis and the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands more.

“How can we let Arabs back? We lived with them for hundreds of years and they stabbed us in the back,” said Jadan Darush Jadan, a peshmerga colonel and Yazidi from Sinjar. “We’ve not seen one example of an Arab helping a Yazidi.”

Outside the city’s main peshmerga base, yellow flags of the KDP — the party of Iraqi Kurdish President Massoud Barzani — hang from lamp posts.

The day of Sinjar’s liberation, Barzani said the city was freed by “the blood of the peshmerga and became part of Kurdistan.”

In an area contested by a concoction of communities and militias, his rhetoric was not well received by everyone.

“The Yazidis don’t trust the peshmerga and the peshmerga don’t trust the Yazidis,” a Yazidi tribal leader said. “Sinjar cannot be a place of coexistence again.”

How can we let Arabs back? We lived with them for hundreds of years and they stabbed us in the back. JADAN DARUSH JADAN PESHMERGA COLONEL AND YAZIDI FROM SINJAR, IRAQ

JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGES FILES A man walks through the rubble of his neighbourhood on Nov. 15 in Sinjar, Iraq, after Kurdish forces, aided by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes, liberated the town from extremists.