As Iraqis flee Islamists, relief dampened by fears of revenge

IMAM GHARBI: The woman said her husband was an Islamic State (IS) fighter, but that she left him after trying, in vain, to persuade to him to defect. Last week, she took their six children and fled across the battle lines toward ground controlled by the Iraqi army, she said.

But as the woman spoke in a camp for newly displaced people south of Mosul on Friday – watched by men with guns, with no electricity or food in her tent and her children playing in dirt – her escape seemed like the prelude to another ordeal.

The camp sat next to her village, but she was not allowed to go home, pending an interrogation by Iraqi officials into her past and the activities of her husband, whom she claimed not to have seen in months. Even if she were eventually granted permission to leave, it was not clear there would be a place for her in the village – or, for that matter, in Iraq.

Thousands of people who lived for the past two years under the rule of the militants have begun to escape their villages as a huge Iraqi force closes in on the northern city of Mosul, free now to tell their stories of brutality and privation and near-death escapes.

Most, though, are Sunni Muslims, unable to celebrate just yet as they face questions from the authorities and the country at large about their years living alongside the Sunni militants, as well as any ties to the jihadists, whether real or perceived.

Their treatment by the Shia-led government in the current campaign is seen as crucial to rebuilding Sunni trust in the state, which plummeted so low two years ago that some Sunnis welcomed the militants to their towns, cities and villages.

In other areas captured from IS, though, men and boys have sometimes faced months of screening, with human rights groups reporting incidents of execution, torture and arbitrary arrest by the country’s array of militias and security forces.

Those with family members who joined the IS, such as the woman, who gave only her first name, Khowla, face a different kind of reckoning – often barred from returning to their villages by local officials, tribal authorities or vengeful neighbours. Khowla insisted it would be different for her, saying her hometown neighbours had welcomed her after her escape from a village farther north in IS territory, where she had been living with her husband.

“The whole village received me. They all like me. They cried for me,” she said. But another family had moved into her home. And she had already started to brace herself for the recriminations she would face because of her husband’s affiliation with IS.

“It wasn’t my fault,” she said, as night fell on the camp. “I’m not guilty. Why should we be displaced?”

Millions of people have been uprooted over the past two years by IS’s expansion and by the military operations to defeat the militants – a mass displacement that has recalled Iraq’s recent painful eras, including the US-led invasion and the bloody civil war that followed.

Each era has been scarred, too, by social upheaval, revenge killings or forced displacements that over years have fractured and reshaped the country.

Iraqi officials have taken measures some hope will limit the potentially violent aftermath of the Mosul campaign, for instance, by limiting the kinds of forces that will enter the city and excluding sectarian militias. They have said they are trying to streamline the screening process and are urging civilians to stay in their homes. – Washington Post