Slow and tough return of Iraq’s Kakai minority
NEAR KALAK:
Guli Hassan Warani’s village east of the Iraqi city of Mosul was retaken from jihadists five months ago but it is still a ghost town that its Kakai residents are struggling to rebuild. The Kakai are a secretive religious minorityWarani insisted the name of his village not be mentioned-that was badly hit when the Islamic State (IS) group swept through northern Iraq’s Nineveh plain in August 2014. “Nobody is coming to help us so someone has to get the work done,” he said, as he busily collected rubble from his front yard and discarded it in a bucket. “The jihadists set fire to my house, I’m sifting through the debris to salvage what I can,” Warani said. An inscription IS militants spray-painted in black across his front door is still visible: “Property of the Islamic State.”
The Kakai, whose men sport trademark bushy moustaches, follow a faith that draws on a number of beliefs, including reincarnation, and are found mostly in northern Iraq and neighboring Iran. Some of its followers say Kakaism it is subgroup of Islam, but that claim appears to have risen mostly as a protective measure to ensure peaceful coexistence with Muslim neighbors. “We’re different,” said Saman Khalil, a 30-year-old man from the same village, explaining why IS considers them infidels. “Moreover, many of us have worked with the Americans and with the peshmerga,” he said, referring to the 2003-2011 US occupation of Iraq and the forces of the autonomous Kurdish region.”For all these reasons, Daesh (IS) hates us. On the front line, no village suffered as much as ours. The jihadists wanted to destroy our culture,” said Khalil. Salman Ahmed Abdullah, one of the villages’ two mayors, said residents from only around 50 homes-or about 10 percent of the population-had returned.”It’s understandable: there is no water, no electricity, no school... and bombs everywhere, in the empty houses, in the fields,” he said.
Large red crosses were painted on some buildings suspected of being booby-trapped. Abdullah, who fled with the rest of the village in August 2014, was among the first to return, in September this year. He found that his home had been used by IS as a command headquarters. His furniture was destroyed and slogans glorifying the “caliphate” that IS proclaimed two years were painted on his walls. In his kitchen, a large slab of concrete covered the entrance of a tunnel IS fighters used to conceal their equipment and communicate with a neighboring home. Freshly painted columns, decorated ceilings and elaborately festooned curtains: the mayor has spared no effort in trying to restore his home to its past glory. Others are less lucky. Just nearby, an explosion left a fourmeter deep crater and leveled 10 surrounding homes.
“Daesh had rigged a suicide truck with explosives to attack peshmerga positions but it was destroyed in a coalition strike,” said Saman Khalil’s twin brother Kameran. A mortar tube still stands on a little hill at the back of his garden that overlooks a plain where the front line between IS and Kurdish forces once was. “I was so excited, I came back the day the peshmerga retook the village, only to find the jihadists had torched my home,” he said. “I felt really terrible and it was also very unwise to return so soon. One of my neighbors triggered a booby-trap rigged to the handle of his front door,” Khalil said. “His house collapsed on top of him.”
Clearing all the booby-traps left behind by IS’s bomb makers when they retreat is a pre-requisite for a return to life in any liberated town and village. “Of course there was some military mine clearing on the main streets, but only very basic,” said Jean Valette d’Osia, deputy president of Fraternite en Irak, a French NGO that supports minorities in Iraq. “Then comes the phase of civilian mine clearing, one home and one field at a time. Without it there is no reconstruction, and without reconstruction there is no return of the population.”—