Tuz Khurmatu, Iraq // As calm returned to the deserted streets of Tuz Khurmatu, Kurdish fighters at a peshmerga base on the edge of the town stuck photos of fallen comrades on the wall.
Two officers from their unit died when armed Shiite groups attacked their position during heavy clashes that began on Saturday and continued despite urgent attempts to broker a ceasefire.
Politicians and military leaders came to an agreement on Wednesday to end the latest outbreak of violence in the contested town, but few believe the peace will last long.
Lying on the southern rim of a swathe of land claimed by both the Kurds and the government in Baghdad, Tuz Khurmatu could become the fuse that ignites a tinderbox of tensions into a full-scale conflict between the peshmerga and government-sanctioned Shiite militias known as the Hashed Al Shaabi.
“After the war against Daesh is over, they will try and take our land. They are worse than Daesh,” Brig Gen Saeed Ali Mohammed, the commander of peshmerga forces in Tuz Khurmatu, said of the militias.
For now, the Kurds and the Hashed are uneasy allies in the fight against ISIL. Both played a key role in blunting and then reversing the extremists’ surge in Iraq, but relations have been poor from the outset.
Supported by Iran, the Hashed have become more powerful than the government in Baghdad, and consider themselves the defenders of Shiism and of the Iraqi state. This puts them at odds with the mainly Sunni Kurds, who took advantage of the Iraqi army’s flight from ISIL’s advance to move into areas that they consider historically theirs, but which were not included in the autonomous Kurdish region established in 1992.
Tensions in Tuz Khurmatu first boiled over with a shootout between peshmerga and Hashed fighters at a checkpoint last November. In response, Hashed members and groups of armed local Turkmen kidnapped Kurdish residents and burned Kurd-owned shops, while peshmerga and armed Kurds did the same in Shiite areas, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.
Tuz Khurmatu is ethnically and religiously mixed, with about 100,000 inhabitants made up of Sunni Kurds and Arabs, and Shiite Turkmen.
Hashed militias started arriving in the town after the peshmerga repelled ISIL attempts to take it in the summer of 2014, which is when the killings began.
The Turkmen started to join the Hashed units or create their own armed groups and began murdering Sunni Arabs, Kurdish and Arab residents told The National.
“If you look down the wells outside of town, you will see them filled with bodies of Sunni Arabs that have been kidnapped and killed,” says Barham Ahmed, a local Kurdish doctor.
A member of the city council who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals said the militias had killed 250 people so far. Sunni Arabs have largely fled the town, reducing their population size from about a quarter to next to none, Dr Ahmed said.
The success of ISIL has fanned sectarian hatred amongst Iraq’s Shiite majority, and the Hashed have previously been accused of sectarian human rights abuses in areas they have retaken from the terror group.
But the Hashed, whose motivation ranges from sectarian to nationalist, also eye the Kurdish presence in Tuz Khurmatu with hostility, and they do not accept Kurdish claims to the town.
The Kurds are unwilling to budge.
“Tuz Khurmatu is part of Kurdistan. We will not accept that our enemies take even an inch of our land,” said Brig Gen Mohammed, sitting in his office beneath photos of his fallen men.
The severity and the duration of the most recent clashes underline the animosity between the two sides. While officials have tried to downplay the scale of the fighting, members of a police unit told The National that 10 Kurdish fighters had died. Mr Ahmed, who treated the wounded, said 28 peshmerga came to his hospital for treatment on the first day alone.
On the day of the agreement, Kurdish troops claimed they were still coming under fire while delivering supplies to their bases in the city.
The Kurds claim that the fighting started when mortar rounds were fired into their neighbourhoods from Turkmen areas. Residents say mortar rounds continued to crash down in the early hours of Wednesday, and that sniping from Shiite areas ceased only on Tuesday evening.
The fighting has put the Kurdish community on edge.
“The Hashed are worse than Saddam, who would leave you alone if you didn’t say anything. The Hashed kill you even if you do nothing,” laments Mallah Karim, an old man shopping for groceries at a street market.
Residents say the market used to come under sniper fire until the Kurds cut off the road leading into the adjacent Shiite neighbourhood with a barrier of blast walls earlier this year. They refer to this structure, which is made taller by bricks piled on top of the concrete barriers, as the “Berlin Wall”.
Through narrow gaps in the wall, sandbagged Hashed positions can be seen, no further than 100 metres away. The buildings are pockmarked with bullet holes, and spent cartridges litter the ground in front of the wall.
The deal struck between the Kurds and the Hashed calls for both sides to withdraw their units from the town by Friday, and for police units from Tikrit and Kirkuk to enter and patrol the city.
Most expect the ceasefire to be brittle. Brig Gen Mohammed says he is pessimistic that the truce will hold over the long term.
“But for now we want peace so that we can focus on the common enemy, Daesh,” he added.
Tuz Khurmatu is one of the many places that could become a battlefield for the Kurds and Shiite militias once the common enemy is vanquished. In Jalawla, a city to the south-east, the peshmerga expelled the Hashed after a shootout last year. The biggest bone of contention is the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which the peshmerga took over from the collapsing Iraqi army in 2014 and successfully defended against ISIL.
The Kurds consider the ethnically mixed city to be Kurdish, and its oil is an important plank for their aspirations for independence from Iraq.
“We took Kirkuk with our blood and we will defend it with our blood,” says Sami Ali, a peshmerga captain at Tuz Khurmatu.
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
