BAGHDAD—A young man named Ahmed told me recently that his family is planning to flee their besieged hometown in the “Sunni triangle,” the area northwest of Baghdad that is thickly populated with Sunni Muslims, for the relative safety of Erbil in the Kurdish north. But Ahmed says he won’t be going with them. As fearful as he is about staying in his town, he’s even more afraid of leaving it. The reason is that Ahmed, who asked that only his first name be used, once worked as a translator for the U.S. military. As fighters from Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have torn through the countryside they have released prisoners, including many who had been rounded up by U.S. forces during Iraq’s civil war. Ahmed has heard that the freed prisoners are vengefully ambushing people on the road that leads to Kirkuk and, eventually, to Erbil, “looking for people who worked as translators to kill.”
And no one is around to stop them, Ahmed said.
This is what life is like on the ground in the middle of Iraq’s emerging, or re-emerging, civil war. One has a sense of a country totally out of control and wrenched apart by rumor—almost all of it bad. For many Iraqis there is a harrowing, ever-present feeling that anything can happen, and it will usually be the worst thing you can imagine. Reports circulate at breathtaking speed, frequently only to be contradicted minutes later. Individual stories of desperation like Ahmed’s are multiplying hourly.
Ahmed is Sunni, like the members of ISIL. The population of the town where he lives, which lies close to Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, is Sunni. But that affords them little protection. ISIL has surrounded the town and repeatedly attacked it using mortars. So far, the town’s community leaders had managed to keep the ISIL fighters at bay, Ahmed said, but he didn’t know how long they would hold out—hence his family’s imminent departure. “A lot of the people in this town are former translators for the United States, judges, soldiers,” he said. ISIL frequently targets those who work for the United States and the Iraqi government, regardless of their sect. “If ISIL gets in, they will assassinate us all.”
So where, in this picture, are the government forces? When Ahmed and I spoke four days ago, Iraqi security forces had just reported that they “re-took” Samarra, Tal Afar, the Beiji oil refinery and other key locations in majority-Shia or mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods that ISIL and its allies have been fighting to take over. ISIL claimed it was in control of these areas. Some disputed cities may have changed hands more than once. As the Iraqis are prone to saying: Only God knows the truth.
Many Iraqis believe – based on what they’ve told Human Rights Watch – that Iraq’s security forces are overstretched and crumbling. Corrupt or terrified untrained soldiers desert, and others are being slaughtered. ISIL has posted pictures of hundreds of dead Iraqi soldiers and videos of themselves apparently summarily executing border guards who refused to pledge allegiance to the “Islamic State,” claiming the group had killed more than 1,000 members of the army. The Shia militias fighting alongside the army polarize and terrify much of Iraq’s population due to their history of killings with impunity during Iraq’s civil war, and more recent reports of their carrying out summary executions of Sunnis around Baghdad and in Diyala. In turn, ISIL’s unmitigated violence, in the form of daily suicide and car bomb attacks, provide the Iraqi government the cover it needs to work with these militias despite their brutality.
Ahmed told me that community leaders from his town had asked the governor of Salah al-Din, its police chief and the president of the provincial council to intervene against ISIL. “We begged them for help but they told us, ‘We can’t help you now, we have to wait for zero hour.’ When is zero hour? We already have no drinkable water, fuel or gasoline, soon we’ll run out of food,” he said.
It has been 14 days since ISIL took control of Tikrit, occupying its presidential palaces, confiscating the weapons of the Iraqi army’s 4th Division, occupying police buildings and killing former members of the “Awakening councils,” which Sunni tribal leaders organized to defeat Al-Qaeda during Iraq’s previous civil war. Ahmed said that former Iraqi army officers in his town had given the government GPS coordinates for ISIL checkpoints in Tikrit, but that security forces so far had “done nothing.”
Ahmed felt stuck: When I asked him why he thinks government forces or the Shia militias working with them had not yet come to fight ISIL in his area, he expressed a visceral sense of betrayal. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki “doesn’t care about assassinations of Sunni against Sunni as long as the [majority Shia] south is safe,” he said. Right or not, dozens of moderate Sunnis in Iraq hold similar views: After years of discrimination and persecution by government security forces, they now feel the government has abandoned them to the brutal mercies of ISIL.
Many Iraqis blame Maliki for the crisis. Back in 2008, the Iraqi government was supposed to start paying the salaries of members of the Sunni Awakening councils. After Al-Qaeda was defeated, the Sunni tribal and community leaders who ran the councils also looked to the government to incorporate them, as promised, into its civil and security services. Instead, many Sunnis were arrested or extra-judicially executed by government security forces. Some of those who escaped imprisonment or death now head the military councils fighting government security forces across the country—having apparently decided that, for the time being at least, they hate ISIL less than they do Maliki. Beyond his alienation of powerful would-be Sunni allies, Maliki has also incorporated Iran-funded Shia militias into the official security apparatus, and he has failed to honor a 2010 power-sharing agreement under which he was supposed to create a national security council headed by opposition politicians. Instead, Maliki officially remains both interior and defense minister as well as prime minister.
So it’s not hard to see why ISIL and Sunni Baathist groups have decided to join forces and regroup in Iraq. And now, it seems, they are gleefully finishing off the job that Maliki started: destroying the state.
No single person, of course, caused Iraq’s downfall. In recent years Maliki’s opponents undermined the few efforts he made at addressing the concerns of Iraq’s Sunni population (such as his introduction to parliament of a bill last year that would have ended de-Baathification, which both Sunni and Shia opponents overwhelmingly voted down, seemingly as an act of mere political sabotage). But it’s not likely that ISIL or neo-Baathist armed fighters would have much influence if the broader Sunni population hadn’t been alienated by years of illegal arrests, torture and executions by government security forces. I didn’t ask Ahmed about all this, though listening to him, I had the sense I was hearing the testimony of yet another heartbreaking victim of these last years of abuses and mistakes.
Instead, I asked Ahmed where he will go if ISIL enters his town. He paused for a long time. Then, crying softly, he said, “I will hide in the orchards.”
Erin Evers is the Iraq researcher at Human Rights Watch, based in Baghdad.
