Tal Afar: The New Normality of the Old ISIS Stronghold
The town of Tal Afar is a mere one-hour drive from Mosul, the northern capital of Iraq. The road is full of military checkpoints manned by Popular Mobilization Forces (or al-Hashd), decorated with colourful flags. Posters of Qasim Suleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis are everywhere, which reveals the influence of Shiite militias and Iran in this northern corner of Iraq. Only few years back Tal Afar was a major stronghold of ISIS, the infamous Islamic State, which fought a merciless war against Shiites.
“Everything is now normal in Tal Afar”, tells me Sheikh Jamal al-Tah’an, one of the important Sunni tribal chiefs of Tal Afar. By various estimates, some 60% from the original 225 thousand inhabitants of this town are now back. In the city centre one can notice that there are many houses and apartments for sale. Many others are destroyed, probably by airstrikes dating back from times when the American military attempted to take the city back from jihadi forces.
Turkmens are the third largest ethnic group of Iraq, after Arabs and Kurds. In Tal Afar, they are an isolated community, a Turkmen island in two larger tectonic plates: Arabic in the eats and the south, and Kurdish in the north and the west. Tal Afar is half-way between Mosul and Sinjar. In the aftermath of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, Tal Afat became a hotspot of jihadism, first of followers of Al-Tawheed wal-Jihad of Abu Musib al-Zarqawi, and later that of the Islamic State or Daesh. The most notorious among them was Abu Ibrahim al-Quraishi who succeeded as the chief of Daesh in 2019 after the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-declared “calif” of the Islamic State.
When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, Tal Afar became an important hub for Suni rebels. On the one hand, the city had numerous army, security, and police officers in Saddam Huseyn’s forces, unemployed and angry after the US occupation. Plus, Tal Afar became a passage for foreign jihadi militants coming from Syria, the border of which is just 70km to the west. The US military had to do a major operation in 2004 to push the jihadi insurgents out but had few troops to keep the town. After that, the Americans repeated yearly operations against Sunni rebels of Tal Afar, with only temporary results. The Sunni neighbourhoods to the north and east of the city fell to jihadi forces once the American operations ended, and the troops were taken to other regions.
What is less known about Tal Afar is that it went through violent, sectarian civil war immediately after the US invasion of Iraq. When I read the numerous newspaper reports about how the city was divided between Sunni and Shia neighbourhoods, where armed militias started kidnapping and killing civilians after checking identity cards and discovering that they were from the “wrong” sect, sniper, and mortar attacks on the “other” neighbourhoods, all that reminded me of my hometown Beirut during the long Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990. Our sectarian war was Muslim-Christian; in Tal Afar it was Sunni-Shia.
How come Turkmens as a double minority – ethnic and linguistic – and especially in Tal Afar isolated between two bigger ethnic groups that are Arabs and Kurds, and in conditions of foreign occupation, did not show example of internal cohesion and solidarity. Instead, they turned their city into a battleground, and one of the worst examples of mass violence. What is the proper history of Tal Afar, Iraq and the Middle East that produces such mass violence?
It is evident that a certain social hierarchy existed in Tal Afar during the period of Saddam Hussein. Sunnis were overrepresented in state functions, and especially among police and army officers. Even in Mosul, police officers were often originally from Tal Afar. When the US occupation forces dissolved the army and initiated “de-Baathification”, Sunnis were expelled from government posts. Instead, the Americans recruited from among other communities in police and army, and in the case of Tal Afar they were the Shias. As a result, not only lost their former hegemonic position, but also considered their Shia neighbours as “collaborators” with the American occupation.
The violence that was triggered as a result was limitless. In one suicide-attack on April 1, 2007, with a truck filled with 1’800 kgs of explosives killed 152 in a Shia neighbourhood and wounded several hundred people. Tal Afar had over 5’000 deaths during years of sectarian strife.
ISIS and Kidnapped Women and Children
According to journalist Jafar Talafari, ISIS kidnapped 1300 Turkmen civilians among them 460 women and girls and 120 children. Just like ISIS kidnapped and enslaved Yazidi women, they treated Turkmen Shiite women in the same manner. Yet, Turkmen society out of conservatism does not publicize this crime, and the fate of the majority of kidnapped remains unknown.
Even Turkey, which has championed itself as the protectors of Iraqi Turkmens, treats the population of Tal Afar based on their sectarian identities and not that of ethnicity. In other words, Turkey supports Suni Turkmens in Tal Afar, and not that of Shiites – this later being integrated into Shiite-majority Popular Mobilization Forces that are loyal to Iran.
While life is slowly coming back to the town, long decades of wars has changed its demography. While the past Tal Afar was a Sunni dominant city, now most of its inhabitants are Shiite. While local notables talk about return of normality, the wounds of wars are yet to heal, and the fate of hundreds of Shiite Turkmens kidnapped by ISIS remains unknown.
