Shi’ites crashing Mosul offensive to seek revenge
One of the mysteries about the ongoing offensive in Mosul, where Iraqi security forces are now pressing into the northern, eastern and southern edges of the city, was the apparent decision to leave unattended the desert between the battlefield and Syria. That changed when Shi’ite militias fighting under the umbrella of Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) opened a new front in the desert to close the gap. They have already reached the outskirts of Tal Afar, a Turkmen-majority city 55 kilometres west of Mosul.
Shi’ite PMF units have been explicitly excluded from the liberation of Mosul itself, in an effort to reassure the city’s predominantly Sunni Muslim population. But the militias’ side mission in Tal Afar should hardly be a surprise.
The city is closely associated with the rise of Islamic State and its forerunner, al Qaeda in Iraq, and has become infamous as a nest of Sunni terrorists. In 2014, the city’s Shi’ite residents were expelled during the Isis takeover of northern Iraq.
Now the Shi’ite fighters want to take Tal Afar back – and, some suspect, to exact revenge.
In April, Hadi al-Amiri, the head of the Iranian-backed Badr Organisation, began staking out the movement’s claim to dispense justice on the city, saying: ‘‘Only the Popular Mobilisation Forces can go to Tal Afar.’’
Since 2003, Tal Afar has played an outsized role in Iraq’s violent politics. The city’s pre-2003 population of around 200,000 was mostly ethnically Turkmen and approximately three-quarters Sunni and one-quarter Shi’ite.
In the 1980s, Saddam Hussein rewarded loyal Turkmen officers with property grants in the town’s newer northern districts. After Saddam’s fall, these policies left a legacy of division between the mostly Sunni, ex-Baathist residents of northern Tal Afar and the town’s less-developed, poorer and primarily Shi’ite southern areas.
Shi’ite militias like the Badr Organisation used their newfound power after 2003 to control the police force and local government in Tal Afar, placing the city under control of the Shi’ite minority and driving local people into the arms of Sunni terrorist groups. The area became a powerful beacon for recruitment for al Qaeda in Iraq and a safe haven for terrorists.
The Shi’ite exodus from Tal Afar has transformed the liberation of the town into a profoundly personal battle for thousands of Iraqis. During June 2014, most of Tal Afar’s Shi’ite residents fled west into nearby Sinjar, then under the control of the Kurdish Peshmerga – only to be displaced again when Isis overran the Kurdish front lines in Sinjar in August 2014.
The Shi’ite Turkmen were then either flown to Baghdad or bused south, finding refuge in camps in southern Iraq.
Many of the Shi’ite men purged from Tal Afar have found their way back into the liberation struggle. Nearly 12,000 Turkmen from all over northern Iraq have joined the PMF since 2014, many signing up with the militias that receive funding and weapons from Iran.
A large group of Shi’ite Turkmen from Tal Afar joined the new 92nd brigade of the Iraqi Army, which was recruited directly from former Tal Afar residents living in the southern refugee camps.
For Tal Afar emigres, the Badr Organisation and the PMF, the desire to wipe out the Isis presence in the city is intense – and sometimes entirely unrestrained. In October 2014 in Jurf al-Sakhar, a town just south of Baghdad, Shi’ite militias addressed the persistent problem of Isis by entirely depopulating the area.
The PMF has already captured several desert towns infamous for facilitating the entry of suicide bombers from Syria to Mosul.