Yazidis flee fierce clashes between Iraqi army and militia in northern Iraq

Thousands of people from Iraq’s Yazidi minority have fled fighting in Sinjar.

The town in northern Iraq made headlines in 2014 when ISIS took over vast parts of the country and attempted to wipe out the Yazidis.

In the latest clashes, the Iraqi army has been engaged in heavy fighting with a Yazidi militia group, amid a wider tussle for control of territory, as local communities are drawn into regional conflicts involving Turkey, Iran and Iraq.

Fighting between the Iraqi army and the Yazidi Sinjar Resistance Units, or YBS, over the past two days has killed at least one Iraqi soldier and up to 12 Yazidis.

Sinjar’s people are mainly Yazidis, who follow an ancient religion similar to the Zoroastrianism

of pre-Islamic Iran. Murad Ismael, a Yazidi activist, said violence was forcing his community to flee Sinjar “once again”.

The town is home to several Yazidi militias. The YBS is a small group formed to protect the community from ISIS, but which Turkish authorities say has ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a Kurdish rebel group seeking an autonomous region within Turkey.

The PKK has bases in the mountains of the Kurdish region of Iraq and has used the area as a base to attack Turkish forces.

Fighting erupted between the Iraqi army and the Yazidis in January this year, when Iraqi soldiers tried to take control of a YBS-run checkpoint.

In December, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al Kadhimi gave a warning that Iraqi forces would “continue to impose the authority of the state and the law in Sinjar,” amid growing concerns over armed groups.

Meanwhile, Turkey is carrying out a large-scale military operation to clear northern Iraq of PKK fighters who have had hideouts in the area since the 1980s.

Amid these operations, the YBS has also come under attack from Turkish forces, including air strikes aimed at its leadership. This has put the YBS in a difficult position because powerful political groups in Iraq have turned on their allies, the PKK, as oil infrastructure has been destroyed in the conflict.

The YBS also has ties to the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces, or PMF, a collection of militias supposedly under Iraqi government control, many of which are funded by Iran.

Some Iran-backed PMF groups stand accused of firing rockets at Iraqi-Kurdish oil infrastructure, angering the Kurdistan Democratic Party, which is aligned with powerful Iraqi cleric Moqtada Al Sadr, a Shiite who is in dispute with Tehran-supported groups.

PMF groups also stand accused of an attempt on Mr Al Kadhimi’s life, another factor that places the small, PMFaligned Yazidi militia in the Iraqi government’s sights.

The KDP, whose power base in Erbil is 200 kilometres away from Sinjar, has few reasons to intervene in the clashes.

It is aligned with Turkey, whose forces in northern Iraq have come under attack from PMF groups.

With ties to Turkey, the KDP is now in conflict with the PKK, which in the past has fought against the KDP-linked Kurdish forces known as Peshmerga. This has left the Yazidi fighters with few supporters.

The group controls checkpoints around Sinjar but finds itself at odds with powerful groups in Baghdad, the Turkish government and the KDP, the most powerful Kurdish party.

Sherwan Al Douberdani, a provincial deputy, said Yazidi fighters were rejecting demands to pull out of Sinjar and for “the withdrawal of foreign agents”, a reference to the PKK.

The Yazidi Sinjar Resistance Units is a small force that has few supporters amid a regional conflict