It was a chilly January evening, and Khadija Abd and her
family had just finished supper at their farm when the two men with guns burst
into the room.
One wore civilian clothes, the other an army uniform. They
said they were from the Iraqi army’s 20th Division, which controls the northern
Iraqi town of Badoush. In fact, they were ISIS militants who had come down from
the surrounding mountains into Badoush with one thing on their mind: Revenge.
Around 13 more gunmen were waiting outside. The fighters
pulled Khadija’s husband and his two brothers into the yard and shot them dead,
leaving them in a pool of blood — punishment for providing information to the
Iraqi military.
“How can we live after this?” Khadija said. The three
brothers were the providers for the entire family. “They left their children,
their livestock, their wives, and their elderly father who doesn’t know what to
do now.”
A year and a half after the ISIS group was declared defeated
in Iraq, the militants still evoke fear in the lands of their former so-called
caliphate across northern Iraq, AP reported. The fighters, hiding in caves and mountains,
emerge at night to carry out kidnappings, killings and roadside ambushes, aimed
at intimidating locals, silencing informants and restoring the extortion
rackets that financed ISIS’s rise to power six years ago.
It is part of a hidden but relentless fight between the
group’s remnants waging an insurgency and security forces trying to stamp them
out, relying on intelligence operations, raids and searches for sleeper cells
among the population.
The militants’ ranks number between 5,000 and 7,000 fighters
around Iraq, according to one Iraqi intelligence official.
“Although the territory once held by the so-called caliphate
is fully liberated, ISIS fighters still exhibit their intention to exert influence
and stage a comeback,” said Maj. Gen. Chad Franks, deputy commander-operations
and intelligence for the US-led coalition.
In towns around the north, Iraqi soldiers knock on doors in
the middle of the night, looking for suspects, based on intelligence tips or
suspicious movements. They search houses and pull people away for questioning.
Anyone is seen as a potential ISIS collaborator or
sympathizer. In February, Human Rights Watch accused authorities of torturing
suspects to extract confessions of belonging to ISIS, an accusation the
Interior Ministry has denied. Detainees are pushed by the thousands into what
critics call sham trials, with swift verdicts — almost always guilty — based on
almost no evidence beyond confessions or unaccountable informants ′ testimony.
The legacy of guilt weighs heavily especially on women and children, who face
crushing discrimination because of male relatives seen as supporting ISIS.
AP journalists embedded with a battalion of the 20th
Division last month and witnessed several of its raids at Badoush.
Badoush, on the Tigris River just outside the city of Mosul,
is a key battleground because it was once one of the most diehard ISIS
strongholds.
In the summer of 2014, it was a launching pad for the
militants’ blitz that overran Mosul and much of northern Iraq. ISIS built a
strong financial base by extorting money from the owners of Badoush’s many
industrial facilities. Security officials estimate two-thirds of its population
— which numbered around 25,000 before the war — were at one point members or
supporters of the group.
Now the population is divided. Residents who suffered at the
hands of ISIS or lost loved ones to the group are suspicious of neighbors they
believe still support the militants. Within families, some members belonged to
the group and others opposed it.
The Badoush area alone has seen 20 ISIS attacks, from
bombings to targeted killings, since it was retaken from the militants in March
2017, according to the Kurdish Security Council. The militants brag about the
attacks in videos that show fighters storming houses and killing purported
“apostates” and spies.
“The operations that we do now rely on intelligence by
following up the families of ISIS,” said Maj. Khalid Abdullah Baidar
al-Jabouri, commander of a battalion in the 20th Division, speaking at his base
just outside Badoush.
Distrust runs deep among the residents.
In one raid witnessed by the AP, troops banged on the door
of a man who had returned to Badoush a day earlier. He had fled town just
before the ISIS takeover in the summer of 2014 and stayed in the Kurdish town
of Sulaimaniyah throughout their rule. But his father and one of his brothers
remained and joined ISIS.
When the man returned, a local sheikh immediately notified
the military. In the raid, the soldiers searched the house and checked his
phone records for any suspicious calls abroad.
They asked him about his father and brother. “I swear, they
destroyed my life,” the man said. When asked about ISIS, he insisted, “I never
came face to face with them.”
The soldiers took him away for questioning, as his three
little sisters shook and cried with fear. He was later released.
On another occasion, an informant told the army he had
spotted explosives-laden suicide belts in the mountains while out picnicking
and looking for truffles. Presumably, they had been dropped off there for
attackers to retrieve and use. Wearing a balaclava to keep his identity secret,
he led the army to the spot, where they found the belts and detonated them
remotely.
“People in the town are very cooperative,” says Mohammed
Fawzi, an intelligence officer. “But don’t forget that in one house one person
was with ISIS and another member was killed by them. It’s very complicated.”
Among the most chilling ISIS attacks was the Jan. 3 killing
of the three Abd brothers, carried out with brutal precision.
The strangers claiming to be soldiers who entered the Abd’s
house said they just wanted to ask a few questions and that it wouldn’t take
long.
Khadija Abd was immediately suspicious. Her husband, Inad
Hussein Abd and two of his brothers, Abdulmuhsin and Mohammed, were informants
for the Iraqi military and knew the 20th Division’s soldiers personally. So why
didn’t they recognize these men?
After searching the house, the intruders turned aggressive.
They dragged the three brothers outside and beat them. When Khadija tried to
stop them, she was beaten too. The fighters put her, the other wives on the
farm and their children in a room and told them, “If anyone comes out, we shoot
you in the forehead.”
Khadija could hear the men murmuring outside until 10 p.m.
in a dialect of Arabic she couldn’t understand. Then it was silent. All they
heard was the barking of dogs. Khadija thought the men had taken the three
brothers away.
At dawn, she went to get water from the well. She spotted
her husband’s yellow sleeve in the grass. All three brothers lay on the
blood-soaked ground. The militants had used silencers, so the family never
heard the gunshots.
Instinctively, she looked for a mobile to call for help.
“Honestly, I couldn’t even cry. I didn’t cry or scream,” she said.
Memories of the attack return to Khadija in her dreams — how
her daughters screamed “Dad! Dad!” when they saw his body, how one tried to
pull out a bullet out of her dead father’s cheek. “Mom, it won’t come out,” she
told Khadija. Her son is now too afraid to leave his room.
To the children, it’s the army that killed their father, she
said. “They don’t understand anything that’s going on.”
