Jalawla, Iraq // In a dusty ghost town 130km from Baghdad, old fault lines are converging into a blueprint for future conflict between the forces battling to keep ISIL at bay.
Jalawla, shot up and deserted after months of bloody fighting to expel the extremist group, remains empty after the town was finally retaken by Kurdish fighters and Shiite militias last November.
The Kurds and the Shiite units have proven ISIL’s most effective opponents, blunting its surge across Iraq last year after the army collapsed under its onslaught. But in Jalawla, the differences between the reluctant brothers in arms could not be papered over, and tensions quickly escalated when the common enemy had been expelled.
The town, set in the gently rolling desert of Iraq’s Diyala province, is cloaked in the stillness of its arid surroundings. Silence follows the visitor through streets littered with debris, past collapsed buildings and walls pockmarked with bullet holes. Beyond broken shop windows, shelves have been cleared of their contents. Stray dogs prowl the lifeless bazaar, the only inhabitants of Jalawla’s empty shell.
The widespread destruction reminds of the bloodletting required to flush out ISIL, and occasionally a small group of Peshmerga, as the Kurdish fighters are called, come into view. There is no sign of their erstwhile allies, the Shiite militias known as the Hashed Al Shaabi. The Kurds are in full control of Jalawla, after forcing out the Hashed in March.
“I kicked the Hashed Al Shaabi out,” says Mahmoud Sangawi, the firebrand brigadier general of the Peshmerga in Jalawla.
Mr Sangawi claims that the Saraja Khorosani, the Hashed unit that helped take the town, is guilty of looting and the wanton destruction of property in Jalawla.
Whether the Hashed in Jalawla acted improperly cannot be independently verified, and Mr Sangawi’s Peshmerga did not grant The National access to the Khorosani unit that has taken up positions in the nearby town of Sadiya.
In any case, the commander has other qualms about a Hashed presence in Jalawla. A staunch Kurdish nationalist, he has little tolerance for Arab forces in what he considers a historically Kurdish town.
The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and the central government in Baghdad have long been at odds over a vast area of land that lies beyond the autonomous Kurdish region’s boundaries recognised by Iraq’s constitution.
The so-called disputed territories straddle Iraqi Kurdistan and stretch from Syria to Iran. In the most extreme interpretation, Iraqi Kurdistan continues along the Iranian border past Baghdad and far into the south.
When confronting ISIL last year, the Peshmerga gained control of large tracts of the disputed territories, notably the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Jalawla, which lies less than 65km from the border with Iran, is part of that expansion.
The Peshmerga advances have caused disquiet in the Shia-led government and the militias fighting in its name, and in Jalawla tensions are close to boiling point. Mr Sangawi claims that a firefight erupted when the Kurds started constructing outposts facing Sadiya.
“We were fortifying the line between us and the Hashed Al Shaabi with sandbags. We had cranes and lorries come in to build the fortifications, and that was when they attacked us,” says the commander.
Mr Sangawi says that there were no casualties, and the incident is denied by the Hashed.
“There really hasn’t been any conflict between us. We are working together,” says Karim Al Nouri, a spokesman for the Badr Brigades, a prominent Shia milita group.
Mr Sangawi is determined to hold Jalawla, and at present there is no one to challenge the Peshmerga in the town. Aware of the continued threat posed by ISIL, which retains control of about a third of the country, both the central government and the Hashed are reluctant to confront the Kurds.
“The Peshmerga and the Hashed Al Shaabi have to resolve the Daesh problem,” says Mr Al Nouri. “All other problems have to wait until afterwards.”
Apart from a common enemy, the two sides are also kept in check by Iran, a common ally, experts say.
“These tensions will remain but are unlikely to result in open conflict between the Hashed and the Peshmerga at this time, because both groups have the same sponsor, Iran, which wants to keep things under control in order to advance its own interests in Iraq,” says Joost Hiltermann, Middle East programme director at the International Crisis Group.
The seeds of future conflict have already been sown, however, and some believe that the Kurds and the Shia militia will come to blows over Jalawla once ISIL has been defeated in Iraq.
“Yes, it’s going to happen,” says Jacoub Yousif Ali, a former school headmaster who was installed as Jalawla’s mayor by Mr Sangawi.
But Iraq’s Shiites are not the only ones alarmed by the Kurdish presence in Jalawla and other parts of the disputed territories.
Like many places in northern Iraq, the town was subject to Saddam Hussein’s Arabisation campaign that forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Turkmen in the 1970s, and settled Sunni Arabs from southern Iraq in their place.
This massive manipulation of the ethnic balance in northern Iraq is still a grievance to the Kurdish families who have lost their homes, and has left the resettled Arabs at risk of being evicted from areas that the Kurds now control.
Mr Sangawi, for one, feels that these relative newcomers have no future in Jalawla.
“They have to go back to the south. In the future, when there isn’t any concern about their security, they have to go back,” the Kurdish commander says. However, “original Arabs” and Turkmen who can trace their roots in the town back for generations can stay, he says.
Mr Sangawi, a member of the prominent Jaff tribe that he says are Jalawla’s rightful inhabitants, refers to the town only by its Kurdish name: Golala.
Mr Ali is more conciliatory, saying that only those who threw their lot in with ISIL – no more than 700 of the town’s roughly 90,000 inhabitants – will not be allowed to return.
Accurate population figures are hard to come by, as official censuses have been manipulated for political purposes for decades. Yet even Mr Sangawi admits that the Kurds now only form a small minority in the town, and that most of the inhabitants who fled the fighting are resettled Sunni Arabs.
So far, the Kurds share their fate with the rest of Jalawla’s inhabitants, who 10 months after the town’s liberation are still not able to return to their homes, instead living in squalid refugee camps nearby.
Mr Ali says that the town needs to be cleared of improvised explosive devices left behind by ISIL, and that basic services and much of the infrastructure has to be rebuilt after being destroyed by the terror group.
That this has not happened is down to a lack of resources, says the mayor, who estimates that 71 billion dinars (Dh230 million) are needed to make Jalawla habitable again.
“We have asked the Iraqi government to come here and rebuild the city, because it belongs to the province of Diyala, but they haven’t sent any support,” he said.
Instead, the KRG has cemented its claim to Jalawla by promising 25bn dinars for the reconstruction of the city, according to Mr Ali.
If the cash-strapped central government does not have the funds or the will to infuse Peshmerga-held Jalawla with new life, it will not appreciate Kurdish efforts to draw the town into its orbit either. At present, pro-government forces are tied up in the bitter struggle with ISIL in Anbar province, but once the threat from west has been eliminated, Baghdad’s attention will invariably shift to the north.
Whether they call it Jalawla or Golala, most would agree that the town will spell trouble in future.
foreign.desk@thenational.ae