Iraq election concerns as ISIL sleeper cells mount attacks
Diyala provinces have already suffered ISIL attacks.
Mr Abadi has acknowledged the threat posed by ISIL, but any sustained effort to kill civilians, soldiers or police would undermine the prime minister’s push to voters that he is the best candidate to protect Iraq from attack.
On Sunday evening, ISIL members set up a temporary checkpoint on the road between Kirkuk and the Iraqi capital. The militants then reportedly attacked a car travelling south between Daquq and Tuz Khurmato – an ethnically mixed area previously riven by sectarian tensions. Five members of one family were said to have been killed.
ISIL claimed responsibility for the attacks and published footage from the ambush, which it said targeted Shiites.
The unrest also threatens to destabilise oil-producing Kirkuk province, parts of which changed hands last year when national police and soldiers took over from Kurdish forces who had held the eponymous city and its oilfields since 2014.
In a document released on March 8, ISIL claimed to have carried out 58 attacks around Kirkuk since December 20. Entitled “Harvest of Kirkuk”, it listed a string of assassinations, suicide attacks, raids and improvised explosions that the group said had killed or injured 153 members of the Iraqi security forces.
Security sources told The National that ISIL sleeper cells
have been able to take refuge in large tracts of ungoverned areas around the town of Hawija and in the Hamrin mountains, emerging to carry out hitand-run attacks.
In one such attack in mid-February, 27 Popular Mobilisation Forces Shiite militiamen were reported killed in an ISIL ambush in Hawija. Reasserting government control over such a large rural area has proved to be beyond the capabilities of Iraqi forces, which remain stretched after three years of fighting against insurgents.
“The militants are regrouping and retraining to carry out attacks on security forces in the region,” Sarhad Qader, the former police chief of Kirkuk, told The National. “There are hundreds of villages around the Hamrin mountain range which are beyond security forces patrols and control.”
Mr Qader, a Kurd who was removed from his role last October after federal forces reasserted control over Kirkuk, said: “The road to Baghdad from Kirkuk traverses remote areas. That makes it easy for ISIL militants to carry out ambushes.”
The ability of ISIL members to blend into communities has also made them hard to pinpoint and dislodge.
“The ISIL militants are local and they know the area very well, that gives them an advantage over the security forces,” Mr Qader said. “They can move relatively freely in the area and the villagers cannot object because if they co-operate with the security forces they know how severe the consequences will be for them.”
ISIL also appears to be regrouping in Nineveh province, whose capital Mosul is still severely damaged from the ninemonth battle to recapture it that ended last July.
With billions of dollars of damage inflicted on areas hit by fighting, Sunni leaders in Nineveh are trying to maintain close relations with the Baghdad government to secure investment for reconstruction.
It appears unlikely ISIL could recapture or hold large tracts of territory as it did in 2014, when about a third of the country came under its control, but the potential for escalation remains.
“I don’t know whether we could call this a proper insurgency as of now, but there are signs that it could develop if action is not taken,” said Sajad Jiyad, the managing director of Al Bayan Centre for Planning and Studies, a Baghdad think tank.
“The area around Kirkuk and Hawija has not been liberated for long, and it takes time to reassert control and for intelligence and local security forces to get to grips with what’s going on in these villages and towns.”