KIRKUK // The insurgents came at midday, walking across a canal, advancing under cover of mortar fire toward the cluster of three Iraqi villages.
Within eight hours, Shiite residents who fled said the Sunni insurgents had expelled thousands of them from the majority-Sunni province, helped by local Sunnis in neighbouring villages.
“You cannot imagine what happened, only if you saw it could you believe it,” said Hassan Ali, a 52-year-old farmer siting in the Al Zahra Shiite mosque, used to distribute aid in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, where the displaced had fled, some 80 kilometres away.
“They hit us with mortars and mortars, and the families fled, and they kept hitting us. It was completely sectarian. The Shiites, out,” he said.
The attacks took place on June 16 in the neighbouring villages of Chardaghli, Brawchi and Karanaz, as well as a fourth village, Beshir, some 50 kilometres to the north, said the displaced residents. All places were home to Shiite Turkmen, an ethnically distinct minority who speak their own language and are scattered through Iraq.
The expulsions show how Iraq’s sectarian mosaic is unravelling in particularly hateful ways.
They appeared to be part of a plan to create a Sunni-dominated territory from the Syrian border to Baghdad’s edge.
The rough plan appears to have emerged after insurgents, led by fighters of the Al Qaeda inspired Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, began sweeping through Iraq on June 9, seizing the country’s second largest city of Mosul and heading southward into Iraq’s Sunni heartland.
The three Turkmen Shiite villages were in Salahuddin, a central province that links the west to the capital.
Expulsions from those villages were preceded, just days earlier, by insurgents seizing the Turkmen-dominated city of Tal Afar near the Syrian border.
ISIL fighters consider Shiites to be heretics, and proudly post images of them being killed.
But even less-ideological Sunni groups that are fighting alongside the extremists have grievances against Shiites, and see them as an obstacle to having a more autonomous territory.
They deeply resent the Shiite-dominated government of prime minister Nouri Al Maliki. The first mortar shell to hit the three villages in Salahuddin exploded just after lunch on Monday, the displaced said. Residents were worried: villagers had seen jeeps race into the Sunni village of Yenkeje across the canal.
Shiites watched from rooftops as insurgents poured out of their vehicles under cover fire and steadily advanced toward the village, the displaced residents said.
When villagers first fled toward the nearby Sunni villages of Bir Ahmad and Bastamli, they realised that insurgents were also firing mortars at them from that direction. Attempts to flee south to the Shiite village of Brawchi were in vain — it too was under attack. Men, women and children were killed in the melee, three residents said.
“Among them was an old man and a woman, children, youths,” said farmer Ali.
Days after they were killed, after pleading interventions to Sunni tribal leaders, the insurgents agreed to dump the bodies on a roadside for collection. The displaced residents say between 15 and 25 people were killed.
Farmer Ali said he helped bury the dead, which he said numbered 20, in a mass grave in the nearby town of Toz Khormato, controlled by Kurdish forces. On the same day the three villages came under attack, Sunni insurgents also attacked nearby Turkmen Shiite village of Beshir. Within hours, about 7,000 people fled, under sniper fire as they passed neighbouring Sunni villages, displaced residents said. Residents from each village said that after they left, their Sunni neighbours burnt down their homes, set fire to their wheat, and stole their sheep. They said insurgents also blew up some Shiite mosques.
One medical clinic manager from Beshir said he had worked with residents of the nearby Sunni village of Muamaleh for years.
“If you serve somebody for twenty years, could you betray them? Let their bodies be eaten by dogs?” he said.
It wasn’t immediately possible to contact people who had remained in the villages. Fleeing Shiites said they feared retribution if they provided telephone numbers. They also said they wanted to protect those still providing them with information.
Community leaders were trying to account for the thousands of displaced, and some residents were presumed dead.
“Awn Qassim, my brother-in-law, he has seven children, nobody can find him,” said Ayad Suleiman, 28, from Beshir. “Please tell the Red Cross,” he asked.
Within days of the reported expulsions, more of the threads keeping Iraq together unravelled.
Abdul Rahim, the Kirkuk police chief, said residents of three Sunni villages close to front line combat fled into Sunni-majority areas, fearing retribution by Shiites.
Now, in Taza Khormato, only armed men remain defending the pastel-coloured homes in the Turkmen Shiite town. The men evacuated their wives and children, fearing attacks.
In one house, men distributed shiny assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Gunmen patrol the town’s entrance, emblazoned with a poster of an Iraqi soldier standing atop an insurgent’s flag.
“We won’t let anybody enter this village,” said Yashar Hussein, 41, carrying two pistols. “Even if everybody dies.”
* Associated Press
