BAGHDAD // The Sunni militants who seized the riverside town of Buhriz late last month stayed for several hours. The next morning, after the Sunnis had left, Iraqi security forces and dozens of Shiite militia fighters arrived in search of insurgents and sympathisers in this rural community.
According to accounts by Shiite tribal leaders, two eyewitnesses and politicians, what happened next was brutal.
““People started fleeing their homes, leaving behind the elders and young men and those who refused to leave,” one man said. “The militias then stormed the houses. They pulled out the young men and summarily executed them.”
The killings turned this town 50 kilometres north-east of Baghdad into a front line in Iraq’s gathering sectarian war.
In Buhriz and other villages and towns encircling the capital, a pitched battle is under way between the emboldened Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the extremist Sunni group that has led a brutal insurgency around Baghdad for more than a year, and Iraqi security forces, who in recent months have employed Shiite militias as shock troops.
In the run-up to the national elections on Wednesday, Iraq has been fast returning to the horrors of its recent past. Security officials, tribal figures and politicians fear ISIL might choke off the capital as an earlier incarnation of the group did in the years following the 2003 American invasion. Then, Sunni extremists sent multiple car bombs into Baghdad on an almost daily basis, and killed Shiites with impunity.
On Monday, as soldiers and security forces across the country voted in advance of the polling day, suicide bombers killed at least nine people in attacks on polling centres.
The election and the race to form a new government will be contentious, with multiple Shiite lists vying for the premiership – Sunnis and Kurds looking for plum posts – and prime minister Nouri Al Maliki determined to stay in office.
Moderation is a rare commodity. Some of Iraq’s Sunni politicians have denied ISIL’s existence in Anbar province and blamed all troubles on Mr Al Maliki, even if it means ISIL continues to grow.
In turn, militia groups have joined the Iraqi military’s combat missions against the insurgents, and sent fighters to battle Sunni rebels in Syria.
Asaib Ahl Al Haq and Kata’ib Hizbollah, two groups once suppressed by the American military and sponsored by Iran, make up the bulk of the Shiite fighters aiding the Iraqi security forces. According to senior Shiite politicians, individual Asaib and Kata’ib members and others now defend Baghdad as part of an organisation, attached to the prime minister’s military office, called the Sons of Iraq, a name formerly associated with Sunnis who battled Al Qaeda.
However, Mr Al Maliki’s spokesman denied any militias were fighting for the government or belonged to a new organisation that reports to him. “There is nothing like this,” said Ali Mussawi.
When the killing in Buhriz ended, residents and the mayor of neighbouring Baquba counted at least 23 dead.
Amir Al Kinani, a Shiite MP and critic of the prime minister, confirmed that innocent people died in Buhriz at the hands of Sons of Iraq Shiite paramilitaries but called it the cost of the need to expel ISIL from the area. “Yes of course civilians died. I am not defending the killing. ISIL is killing people, they are killing the [Shiites]. They are killing even the Sunnis,” he said. “When the Sons of Iraq entered the area ... they were thinking of only killing ISIL, so there weren’t any war prisoners.”
Other Shiites are horrified by what happened, and feel confused about how to face the threat of ISIL, who they now worry will overrun them.
Mr Al Kinani, other politicians and tribal figures say the Shiite paramilitaries are now assisting the army around the Baghdad belt to fight the insurgency, in part due to desertions and the decimation of some army units.
Security has deteriorated fast over the last four months. In December, Mr Al Maliki launched a campaign against ISIL in their heartland west of Baghdad. Fighting descended into a series of brutal atrocities, often caught on video and in photographs by both militants and Iraqi soldiers.
Iraqi soldiers say they have been trapped in and around the western city of Ramadi, capital of the Sunni-majority Anbar province. They say they have run low on tank shells, lack aerial cover and armoured vehicles, and have been hit by high casualties and desertion rates.
The fighting in Anbar has displaced at least 420,000 people. Ordinary citizens feel that the government has declared war on them.
It has been equally devastating for the military. Military personnel and Iraqi officials say several thousand soldiers have deserted; and well over a thousand, if not more, have been killed. The government has yet to release formal numbers.
Soldiers in Anbar speak with desperation. “We are dumped by our military leadership in these deserted houses in the middle of the orchards, without enough ammunition, without night binoculars,” said one soldier from Ramadi.
His battalion has 120 of its original 750 soldiers; most have deserted and he vows to do the same.
One army officer said Iraq’s special forces, who have led the fight against the insurgency, are now taking defensive positions to avoid more casualties.
* Reuters