The humiliation can be read on Hamed Mahmoud’s face. “Welcome to the“ banks of hunger ” [“Jurf Al-Djoue”] “, proclaims the 54-year-old Sunni, embarrassed to receive in a simple cinderblock hut of a makeshift camp in the middle of the Anbar desert, in western Iraq. The joke poorly masks the distress in which the former officer of Saddam Hussein is plunged, since he had to abandon his agricultural domain and the fertile lands which saw him grow up in Jurf Al-Sakhr (“the rocky banks”) , 80 kilometers downstream on the Euphrates.
That was in June 2014. The 85,000 members of the Janabi tribe fled the city during the final assault by armed Shiite factions against fighters from the Islamic State (IS) organization. Seven years later, and while “total victory” against ISIS was proclaimed in December 2017, they are still scattered between Anbar, Latifiyah and Iraqi Kurdistan. Declared “Restricted area”, their locality – strategically located between Baghdad and the Shiite holy city of Kerbala – is occupied by the Hezbollah Brigades (“Kataeb Hezbollah”, a pro-Iranian Shiite militia).
While the government announces its intention to bring back, by mid-2021, the last displaced persons of the war (1.3 million, according to the International Organization for Migration), no solution is emerging for the inhabitants of Jurf Al-Sakhr. Shiite militias show no intention of evacuating the locality, which they renamed “Jurf Al-Nasr” (“The banks of victory”). “The area was destroyed by military operations. (…) When we have rebuilt, we will see ”, Justifies Mohamed Mohie, the spokesperson for the Hezbollah Brigades, which, according to experts, have set up military camps and secret prisons there.
“No one can enter it: even the former interior minister Qassem Al-Araji was arrested at the gates of the city in 2018! I challenge the Prime Minister, Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, to go there ”, said a relative of Sheikh Adnane Al-Janabi, the chief of the tribe, requesting anonymity for fear of reprisals. All attempts at mediation by Sheikh Janabi and Sunni politicians have failed. “Since the liberation of the city, we have been discussing with the government, with the political parties [chiites]. We even made government training conditional on solving this problem. They are wandering because the decision is not in their hands but in the hands of Iran ”, protests Sunni deputy for Baghdad Ahmad Al-Masari.
You have 65.66% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.
