Tag Archives: Islamic State

Attacker kills three in Liege, Belgium, dies after gun battle with police

A police officer is seen on the scene of a shooting in Liege, Belgium, May 29, 2018. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

By Francois Lenoir and Christopher Stern

LIEGE, Belgium (Reuters) – A man killed two policewomen and a bystander in the Belgian city of Liege on Tuesday before being shot dead in a gunbattle at a school in what prosecutors are treating as a terrorist attack.

The man was named by public broadcaster RTBF as a 36-year-old petty criminal who had been let out on day-release from a local prison on Monday. It said investigators were looking into whether he had converted to Islam and been radicalized in jail.

A public prosecutor told a news conference that the man attacked the policewomen from behind with a knife, described as a box-cutter by RTBF, around 10:30 a.m. (4.30 a.m. ET) on a boulevard in the center of Belgium’s third city, near the German border.

After stabbing the officers, prosecutor Philippe Dulieu said, the man seized one of their handguns and shot both women dead before walking down the street and shooting dead a 22-year-old man who was sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car.

The man then made his way into a high school where he took a woman employee hostage, triggering a major intervention by armed police. Pupils were moved to safety as a gunbattle broke out that sent people in the street racing for cover. Several police were wounded before the attacker was finally killed.

“The event is classed as a terrorist incident,” Dulieu said.

The national crisis center, on high alert since past attacks by Islamic State in Paris and Brussels in the past three years, said it was monitoring events but had not raised its alert level – an indication they do not expect related follow-up attacks.

La Libre Belgique newspaper quoted a police source as saying the gunman shouted “Allahu Akbar” — God is greatest in Arabic.

A man is being consoled by a police officer on the scene of a shooting in Liege, Belgium, May 29, 2018. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

A man is being consoled by a police officer on the scene of a shooting in Liege, Belgium, May 29, 2018. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

GUNNED DOWN

Images posted on social media showed elements of the drama:

Apparently the two police officers, arms bare on what was a hot sunny morning, wearing protective vests and lying in pools of blood a couple of meters apart outside a cafe; the gunman, dressed in black, waving a pistol in each hand, standing in the middle of the road; and finally the assailant emerging from a building onto the street, firing on police, who gun him down.

Prime Minister Charles Michel, expressing his condolences to the families of the victims, said it was too early to say what had caused the incident. King Philippe visited Liege, the biggest city in Belgium’s French-speaking Wallonia region.

An industrial powerhouse on the Meuse river, it was the scene of a mass shooting in 2011, when a man killed four people and wounded over 100 others before turning his gun on himself.

A Brussels-based Islamic State cell was involved in attacks on Paris in 2015 that killed 130 people and on Brussels in 2016 in which 32 died. The Brussels IS cell had links to militants in Verviers, another industrial town close to Liege, where in early 2015 police raided a safe house and killed two men who had returned from fighting with radical Islamists in Syria.

European authorities are deeply concerned about the risks of petty criminals, including those not from Muslim backgrounds, being inspired to Islamist violence while incarcerated.

(Additional reporting by Robert-Jan Bartunek, Alissa de Carbonnel and Philip Blenkinsop in Brussels; Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Richard Balmforthk Larry King)

Baby powder helping fund Islamic State in Afghanistan: report

FILE PHOTO: Afghan National Army troops prepare for an operation against insurgents in Khogyani district of Nangarhar province, Afghanistan November 28, 2017. REUTERS/Parwiz/File Photo

KABUL (Reuters) – Islamic State fighters in Afghanistan are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from illegal mining of talc, much of which ends up in the United States and Europe, advocacy group Global Witness reported on Tuesday.

About 500,000 tonnes of talc, used in products ranging from paint to baby powder, were exported from Afghanistan in the year to March, according to Afghan mining ministry figures cited in the group’s report.

Almost all went to Pakistan, where much of it is re-exported. Pakistan provides more than a third of U.S. imports of talc and much also ends up in the European Union, it said.

“Unwitting American and European consumers are inadvertently helping fund extremist groups in Afghanistan,” Nick Donovan, Campaign Director at Global Witness, said in a statement, calling for stronger checks on imports.

Illegal mining of gemstones and minerals such as lapis lazuli is a major source of revenue for Taliban insurgents and the report said Islamic State was fighting for control of mines in Nangarhar, the province where it has its stronghold.

Nangarhar, on the border with Pakistan, has large deposits of talc as well as minerals such as chromite and marble, and sits on major smuggling routes used for drugs and other contraband.

The report quoted a senior Islamic State militant commander as saying that wresting control of mining assets from other armed groups in Nangarhar was a priority: “The mines are in the hands of the mafia … At any price we will take the mines.”

Security officials in Afghanistan have long been concerned about the uncontrolled traffic in Nangarhar of commodities like talc and chromite, which the Global Witness report said “may be the least glamorous of conflict minerals”.

It said that while it was difficult to estimate the value of the trade to Islamic State, revenue from mining in Nangarhar could amount “anywhere from the high tens of thousands to the low millions of dollars a year”. Somewhere in the hundreds of thousands was a plausible mid-range estimate, it added.

The sum did not appear very high, it said, but the U.S. military estimated the strength of Islamic State in Nangarhar at somewhere between 750 to 2,000 fighters, meaning the funds would be a significant source of revenue to the movement.

An Afghan mining ministry spokesman said a special committee had already been established to coordinate approaches to the issue with security and intelligence services. The ministry planned a news conference this week to address some of the specific issues raised in the report.

(Reporting by James Mackenzie; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Islamic State claims responsibility for church attack in Chechnya

The Islamic State militant group claimed responsibility for an attack on a church in Russia’s Chechnya republic that killed three people, the group’s Amaq news agency said on Sunday.

The group offered no evidence in support of the claim.

Four people attacked the Orthodox church on Saturday, killing two policemen and a churchgoer, Russia’s investigative committee said in a statement. The attackers were killed.

“Islamic State fighters executed an attack on ‘Michael’ Church yesterday in Chechnya’s capital, Grozny,” Amaq said.

Russia, which hosts the soccer World Cup next month, has fought two wars with separatists in the mainly Muslim internal republic since the 1991 Soviet collapse, but such attacks have become relatively rare in Chechnya.

The wider North Caucasus region remains volatile, however, with unemployment and corruption pushing some to embrace radical Islam.

(Reporting by Polina Devitt in Moscow and Ahmed Tolba in Cairo; Writing by Polina Devitt; Editing by Dale Hudson)

Indonesia suicide bomber mum ‘chatted to neighbors about schools, swapped recipes’

FILE PHOTO: Burned motorcycles are seen outside a church, one of the three hit by suicide bombers in Surabaya, Indonesia May 13, 2018. REUTERS/Beawiharta

By Kanupriya Kapoor

SURABAYA, Indonesia (Reuters) – The mother of an Indonesian family of six who launched suicide bomb attacks on three churches chatted to neighbors about schooling and swapped recipes, leading what appeared to be a regular middle-class life and eluding counter-terrorism forces.

The family killed at least 18 people, including themselves, by bombing the churches in Indonesia’s second-biggest city of Surabaya on Sunday in the worst militant attacks in the world’s biggest Muslim-majority country in more than a decade.

Home was a quiet, relatively affluent neighborhood of Surabaya. Most houses in the area have hatchbacks and family cars parked outside and in front a small yard more often than not strewn with toys and children’s bicycles.

“My wife talked to the mother all the time about the children’s education, about recipes. They often met at the local market,” said Wery Trikusuma, who lives next door.

“They were quite open and interactive. They contributed money to neighborhood repairs for example for roads. They often left their front gates open to receive guests, he said, adding it “seemed impossible that they could do this”.

The day after the church bombings, six died, including four bombers, in another suicide attack. Another family of five blew themselves up, but the eight-year-old daughter survived.

In another blast in an apartment near Surabaya on Sunday night, three members of a family believed to have been making bombs were killed when one device went off by accident. Three children survived.

Police also later shot dead four people with suspected links to the attacks.

Police suspect the attacks were carried out by a cell of the Islamic State-inspired Jemaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), an umbrella organization on a U.S. State Department terrorist list that is reckoned to have drawn hundreds of Indonesian sympathizers of the extremist group.

RAW INTELLIGENCE

The families all lived in ordinary middle-class districts where neighbors say they saw few things to mark them out.

“We had received very raw intelligence that there may be an attack in the week before Ramadan but not about when exactly or where,” said a senior government official, referring to the Muslim fasting month that started on Thursday in Indonesia.

“But there was never any report about an entire family being used, or that that was even possible.”

Police say the father in the family that attacked the churches, Dita Oepriarto, was head of the local JAD cell and likely radicalized decades earlier.

Indonesia set up a counter-terrorism unit, Detachment, or “Densus”, 88, in 2003 which is credited with thwarting hundreds of plots, but the Surabaya attacks mark the squad’s biggest challenge in decades.

In all, around 30 people have been killed since Sunday in the attacks, including 13 of the suspected suicide bombers.

According to the senior government official, President Joko Widodo decided not to fire top security personnel when he learnt of the shocking nature of the attacks and instead called for action to dismantle the networks and said he would use executive powers to force through a strengthened anti-terrorism law if parliament did not act.

The presidential palace did not respond to requests for comment.

“This attack demonstrates that entire communities and families can be radicalized,” Rohan Gunaratna, a Singapore based terrorism expert, said.

“This means that a catch and kill response alone will not work. The government must engage more with community leaders, schools, religious leaders in addition to expanding counter-terrorism capabilities,” he said.

FAMILY SECRETS

Wawan Purwanto, a spokesman for the intelligence agency, said militants were being influenced by tactics in the Middle East, where children and women have been used in attacks.

He said there may also have been a belief that the whole family would enter heaven by carrying out an attack together.

Ansyad Mbai, a former head of Indonesia’s anti-terrorism agency (BNPT), said using a family unit for an attack helped ensure planning was kept secret.

The parents of the families had indoctrinated their children and every Sunday evening made them attend a prayer circle with adults, police said.

Oepriarto’s house is now boarded up and cordoned off with police tape after being searched by bomb squad and forensics teams for two days.

“On the day of the attack, the father and the two male children attended morning prayers at the neighborhood mosque and then came back home briefly. They went out again at around 7 a.m. but I didn’t know where they were going. It turned out to be to the churches,” said the neighbor, Trikusuma.

Still, it appears there were some warning signs.

In the attack on Surabaya’s city police headquarters on Monday, the father who brought his family on motorbikes to blow themselves up had come up on police radar after visiting terror convicts in a nearby jail, according to the community head.

Kukuh Santoso, 47, said that six to eight months ago the father, Tri Murtiono, had visited the convicts in a jail in Porong and after that police had paid a visit to the family.

“Besides that, we had absolutely no idea they were even thinking like this”, said Santoso.

A counter-terrorism source confirmed this account, but declined to elaborate.

(Additional reporting by Agustinus Beo Da Costa; Writing by Ed Davies; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Iraqi election commission says Kirkuk voting stations under siege, staff inside

The head of Iraq's Independent Higher Election Commission Riyadh al-Badran speaks during a news conference in Baghdad, Iraq May 16, 2018. REUTERS/Khalid al Mousily

By Ulf Laessing

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Gunmen in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk were on Wednesday besieging several polling stations containing election staff, four days after a national vote, the head of the electoral commission said.

Riyadh al-Badran said the gunmen, who he did not identify, were putting pressure on the commission to change the election results in the multi-ethnic region.

“The employees of the commission are in a hostage situation,” he said, calling on authorities to provide protection.

The final nationwide results should be announced in the next two days, Badran said.

The initial results in Kirkuk were disputed by the Turkmen and Arab communities of the region which is also inhabited by a large Kurdish population.

The election commission said on Tuesday that initial results from Kirkuk indicated a win for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), a historic Iraqi Kurdish party.

In October, Iraqi forces backed by Shi’ite militias dislodged Kurdish Peshmerga fighters who had taken control of Kirkuk city in 2014, preventing its capture by Islamic State militants who had overrun Iraqi army positions in northern and western Iraq.

The return of the Iraqi army to Kirkuk was greeted with relief by the Arab and Turkmen populations there.

Saturday’s elections were the first in Iraq since the defeat of Islamic State last year by Iraqi forces backed by a U.S.-led coalition.

Initial nationwide results showed a surprise victory for the bloc that supports populist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shi’ite not aligned with Iran who campaigned on a nationalist platform, tapping into public resentment against widespread corruption and huge social disparities.

A tally by Reuters of provincial results announced over the past three days shows Sadr’s list leading, followed by Amiri, a close ally of Iran, and then outgoing Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani was holding talks with politicians in Baghdad to promote the formation of a new cabinet which would have Iran’s approval, two people familiar with the political process underway said.

(Reporting by Maher Chmaytelli and Ulf Laessing; Editing by Toby Chopra)

Indonesian children who joined suicide attacks kept isolated by parents

Anti-terror policemen walk during a raid of a house of a suspected terrorist at Medokan Ayu area in Surabaya, Indonesia May 15, 2018. REUTERS/Sigit Pamungkas

By Kanupriya Kapoor

SURABAYA, Indonesia (Reuters) – The parents of Indonesian children and young adults who took part in deadly suicide bombings in Surabaya had isolated them within a tightly knit circle of militant Islamists, police said on Tuesday.

A family of six killed at least 13 people, including themselves, by bombing three churches in Surabaya on Sunday in the worst militant attack in the world’s biggest Muslim-majority country since the bombing of restaurants in Bali in 2005.

On Monday, another militant family of five riding two motorbikes blew themselves up at a police checkpoint in the city, wounding 10 people and killing four of the family and two others. An eight-year-old daughter survived.

“These children have been indoctrinated by their parents. It seems they did not interact much with others,” East Java Police Chief Machfud Arifin told reporters.

The eight-year-old daughter who survived did not have explosives strapped to her, but was thrown three meters (10 ft) into the air by the blast and was receiving intensive care in hospital, police said.

“She’s conscious. She will be accompanied by relatives and social workers when questioned by police,” said Arifin.

Police in Sidoarjo, near Surabaya, recovered pipe bombs at an apartment where a blast on Sunday killed three members of a family alleged to have been making bombs.

Three children survived and in interviews with police described how they had interacted only with parents and adults of similar ideology.

Every Sunday evening they were made to attend a prayer circle with these adults, said Arifin, adding that the families behind the two sets of suicide attacks had attended.

Police said that the fathers of the families involved in the church bombing and the apartment in Sidoarjo where bombs were found were also friends.

After some major successes tackling Islamist militancy since 2001, there has been a resurgence in recent years, including in January 2016 when four suicide bombers and gunmen attacked a shopping area in the capital, Jakarta.

MIDDLE CLASS HOUSING COMPLEX

Police suspect the attacks on the churches were carried out by a cell of the Islamic State-inspired group Jemaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), an umbrella organization on a U.S. State Department terrorist list that is reckoned to have drawn hundreds of Indonesian sympathizers of Islamic State.

The family involved in those attacks lived in a middle class housing complex in the city and police said the father was the head of a local JAD cell.

“I think the family setting and the isolation from the outside world… were perfect settings for him to indoctrinate the rest of his family,” said Alexander Raymond Arifianto, an Indonesia expert at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Surabaya Mayor Tri Rismaharini was quoted as saying by news portal Tempo.co that one of the sons had also refused to attend flag raising ceremonies or go to classes on Indonesia’s state ideology Pancasila, which enshrines religious diversity under an officially secular system.

Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla urged the public to provide information that could help stop attacks.

“Please be the government’s eyes and ears so these things won’t happen in the future,” Kalla told a conference in Jakarta.

In all, around 30 people have been killed since Sunday in attacks, including 13 suspected perpetrators, police said.

Sidney Jones, of the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, said in a commentary for the Lowy Institute that the attacks showed how urgent it was for authorities to learn more about family networks.

“If three families can be involved in two days’ worth of terrorist attacks in Surabaya, surely there are more ready to act,” he said.

(For a graphic on ‘Bomb attacks in Indonesia’ click https://tmsnrt.rs/2rBtid8)

(Additional reporting by Jessica Damiana and Gayatri Suroyo; Writing by Ed Davies; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Plane carrying bodies of 20 Egyptian Christians beheaded in 2015 leaves Libya

Coffins containing the remains of the bodies of Egyptian Copts killed by Islamic State militants in Sirte are carried by the plane to be transferred to Egypt, in Misrata, Libya May 14, 2018. REUTERS/Ismail Zitouny

MISRATA, Libya (Reuters) – A Libyan plane carrying the bodies of 20 Egyptian Christians killed in 2015 by Islamic State in its former Libyan stronghold of Sirte left the western city of Misrata for Egypt on Monday afternoon, a Libyan official said.

Libyan Red Crescent workers carry coffins, containing the remains of the bodies of Egyptian Copts killed by Islamic State in Sirte, which are to be transferred to Egypt after the forensic tests were completed and the bodies identified, at a morgue in Misrata, Libya May 14, 2018. REUTERS/Ismail Zitouny

Libyan Red Crescent workers carry coffins, containing the remains of the bodies of Egyptian Copts killed by Islamic State in Sirte, which are to be transferred to Egypt after the forensic tests were completed and the bodies identified, at a morgue in Misrata, Libya May 14, 2018. REUTERS/Ismail Zitouny

The bodies were recovered in October after a captured commander from the jihadist group gave away the area where they had been buried, officials said at the time. Libya agreed to return them to Egypt after Islamic State was pushed out of the city late last year. The Coptic Christians were beheaded on a beach in February 2015 wearing orange jumpsuits, according to a video posted by the militant group.

The body of a Ghanaian national who was killed with them was not on board the plane bound for Egypt, the official said. Islamic State took control of Sirte in 2015 and lost the city late last year to local forces backed by U.S. air strikes.

(Reporting by Ahmed Elumami; Writing by Ulf Laessing; Editing by Catherine Evans)

Militant family uses child in suicide bomb attack on Indonesian police

Police aim their weapons at a man who was being searched by other police officers following an explosion at nearby police headquarters in Surabaya, Indonesia May 14, 2018 in this photo taken by Antara Foto. Antara Foto/ Didik Suhartono / via REUTERS

By Kanupriya Kapoor

SURABAYA, Indonesia (Reuters) – A family of Islamist militants in Indonesia carried an eight-year-old into a suicide bomb attack against police in Surabaya on Monday, a day after another militant family killed 13 people in suicide attacks on three churches in the same city.

The suicide bombers rode two motorbikes up to a checkpoint outside a police station and blew themselves up, police chief Tito Karnavian told a news conference in Indonesia’s second-largest city.

He said the child survived the explosion, and CCTV footage showed the girl stumbling around in the aftermath.

Four officers and six civilians were wounded in the attack, East Java police spokesman Frans Barung Mangera said.

“We hope the child will recover. We believe she was thrown 3 meters (10 ft) or so up into the air by the impact of the explosion and then fell to the ground,” said Mangera, adding she had been rushed to hospital.

President Joko Widodo branded the attacks in Surabaya the “act of cowards”, and pledged to push through a new anti-terrorism bill to combat Islamist militant networks.After some major successes tackling Islamist militancy since 2001, there has been a resurgence in recent years, including in January 2016 when four suicide bombers and gunmen attacked a shopping area in the capital, Jakarta.

Police suspected Sunday’s attacks on the churches were carried out by a cell of the Islamic State-inspired group Jemaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), an umbrella organization on a U.S. State Department terrorist list that is reckoned to have drawn hundreds Indonesian sympathizers of Islamic State.

“In the case of Surabaya, they escaped detection, but once it happened we moved fast to identify their network,” Karnavian said.

The father of the family involved in those attacks was the head of a JAD cell in the city, the police chief said.

Earlier, police said his family was among 500 Islamic State sympathizers who had returned from Syria, but the police chief said that was incorrect.

During the hunt for the cell, police shot dead four suspects and arrested nine, media reported police as saying.

The police chief said the JAD cell may have been answering a call from Islamic State in Syria to “cells throughout the world to mobilize.”

He said the imprisonment of JAD’s leader, Aman Abdurrahman, could be another motive, and cited clashes with Islamist prisoners at a high-security jail near Jakarta last week in which five counter-terrorism officers were killed.

Karnavian said the JAD attacks used a powerful home-made explosive triacetone triperoxide (TATP), known as the “mother of Satan”, and commonly used in Islamic State-inspired attacks.

In another incident in Sidoarjo, south of Surabaya, police recovered pipe bombs at an apartment where an explosion killed three members of a family alleged to have been making bombs, Karnavian said. Three children from the family survived and were taken to hospital.

In all, 31 people have died since Sunday in attacks, including 13 suspected perpetrators and 14 civilians, police said.

CHILDREN USED IN ATTACKS

CCTV footage of the blast outside the police station early on Monday morning showed two motorbikes arriving at a checkpoint next to a car followed by an explosion as officers approached.

Security experts said the attacks represented the first time in Indonesia that children had been used by militants on a suicide mission.

“The objective of using a family for terror acts is so it is not easily detected by the police,” said Indonesian security analyst Stanislaus Riyanta.

He said that families could also avoid communicating using technology that could be tracked.

Indonesia’s chief security minister said that police backed by the military would step up checks across Indonesia.

In Surabaya, police officers wearing balaclavas were posted at major hotels and landmarks on Monday.

President Widodo said he would issue a regulation in lieu of a new anti-terror law next month if parliament failed to pass the bill.

Police have complained that laws do not give them enough powers to detain suspects to prevent attacks.

Speaker of parliament Bambang Soesatyo told Metro TV that the house was committed to wrap up debate on the bill this month, but called on the government to help resolve differences.

(For a graphic on ‘Bomb Attacks in Indonesia’ click https://tmsnrt.rs/2rBtid8)

(Additional reporting by Agustinus Beo Da Costa, Fransiska Nangoy, Tabita Diela and Gayatri Suroyo; Writing by Ed Davies; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)

Iraqi Kurdish fortunes reversed in Kirkuk, the city they longed for as capital

An Iraqi security member dips his finger in ink after casting his vote at a polling station, two days before polls open to the public in a parliamentary election in Kirkuk, Iraq May 10, 2018. REUTERS/Ako Rasheed

By John Davison

KIRKUK, Iraq (Reuters) – An intersection in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk paints a vivid picture of the Kurds’ rapid turn of fortune. The towering statue of a fighter who used to brandish a Kurdish sunburst flag now holds the red, white and black of Iraq’s Baghdad government.

Opposite, a fortified former headquarters of the Kurdish autonomous region’s ruling party serves as a base for the Iraqi forces that led Kirkuk’s swift recapture in October and dashed hopes of Kurdish independence.

Many Iraqi Kurds long for Kirkuk as the eventual capital of their own state, and as Islamic State went down to defeat in northern Iraq last year the oil-rich city seemed closer than ever to becoming a permanent center of Kurdish power.

That short-lived ascendancy has been reversed, and hopes for a Kurdish Kirkuk have faded ahead of an Iraqi national election on Saturday expected to weaken the main Kurdish parties there.

“We had many dreams for Kurdistan but these have gone – we’ve lost it all,” said Mariwan Ali, a 28-year-old former fighter in the Kurdish peshmerga militia who now works as a cook in Kirkuk.

He said he would boycott the vote. “I refuse to vote in any Iraqi election, for anyone who’s part of the state of Iraq.”

Ali and his comrades helped drive Islamic State out of Kirkuk after Iraqi government forces fled a lightning advance by the jihadist militants in 2014.

With that, the Kurds, who were persecuted for decades under Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, controlled Kirkuk for the first time, and the Erbil-based Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) duly erected the statue of the Kurdish fighter.

The peshmerga, Iraqi military and Shi’ite Muslim militias joined forces to defeat Islamic State in 2017. But with their common enemy gone, the rivalry between the KRG and Baghdad was laid bare, especially in Kirkuk.

A decision to include Kirkuk in a controversial Kurdish referendum in September that voted overwhelmingly for independence sealed its fate. Within weeks, Iraqi government forces had advanced on the city, and captured it in a matter of days.

Now, only the Iraqi flag is permitted to fly.

The city’s takeover was a devastating blow, taking much of the KRG-run autonomous region’s oil revenue, and a symbolic loss that local Kurds say has left them humiliated and considering leaving again.

“I couldn’t bear to see another Kurdish flag ripped up in front of me – I’d rather die,” 67-year-old Ali Majid, another former fighter who volunteered post-retirement to fight against Islamic State, said at his restaurant.

“It’s humiliating to be a Kurd now in Kirkuk. You get harassed at checkpoints, and I had a Kurdish flag sticker taken off my car,” he said. “I also got rid of the gun I kept at home, after repeated searches by Shi’ite militias” who had helped recapture Kirkuk in October.

Majid was one of few Kurds wearing the traditional sash across his waist.

Other expressions of Kurdish nationalism have disappeared. At a school used as a polling station for the September referendum, where Kurds danced at the time, Iraqi federal police filed in on Thursday to cast their early ballots.

MUTED NATIONALISM

Majid said that if the election result weakened the Kurds, he would leave Kirkuk.

Saturday’s election – Iraq’s first since Islamic State was driven out – will shape attempts to heal the country’s deep divisions and could shift the regional balance of power.

The three main ethnic and religious groups, the majority Shi’ite Arabs and the minority Sunni Arabs and Kurds, have been at loggerheads for decades.

In Kirkuk, home to many of Iraq’s minorities including Kurds, Turkmen, Sunni Arabs and Assyrian Christians, the distribution of seats across ethnicity and religion is not expected to change.

Kurds, who are scattered across Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria, suffered a particularly brutal fate under Saddam, who gassed them, buried them in mass graves and gave their land to Arabs.

With many Kurds disillusioned about the political elites who led the failed independence bid, the election could undermine the grip on power that two ruling parties have enjoyed since Iraq’s Kurdish region gained semi-autonomous status in 1991.

Kurdish campaigning in Kirkuk has been muted. Supporters of Turkmen and Sunni Arab candidates paraded through the city center on Thursday, tooting car horns and waving flags, but no such fanfare was seen in the quieter Kurdish neighborhoods.

Many from Kirkuk’s other minorities say they are happy to be back under the Baghdad government.

“Things are better now, there’s more order. We prefer the Iraqi state to be in control here, since it’s a legal government and not just a non-state actor,” Turkmen oil worker Bashar Aref, 45, said at a shopping center.

“Before October it was tense.”

A return of Kurdish control looks less likely than ever. Local Kurdish media reports that Kurdish security forces might have a future role in the policing of the area have been rejected by Iraqi military officials.

“We have no orders to the effect that the peshmerga will return to Kirkuk,” General Maan Saadi of the elite Counter Terrorism Service said from his office in the former Kurdistan Democratic Party headquarters.

“The city is under control, and more stable than it was under the peshmerga.”

(Reporting by John Davison, with additional reporting by Mustafa Mahmoud; Editing by Michael Georgy/Mark Heinrich)

Iraqis voting in first election since Islamic State

An Iraqi security member casts his vote at a polling station two days before polls open to the public in a parliamentary election in Baghdad, Iraq May 10, 2018. REUTERS/Thaier al-Sudani

By Ahmed Aboulenein

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – For the first time since driving out Islamic State, Iraqis go to the polls on Saturday in an election that will shape attempts to heal the country’s deep divisions and could shift the regional balance of power.

Iraq’s three main ethnic and religious groups, the majority Shi’ite Arabs and the minority Sunni Arabs and Kurds, have been at loggerheads for decades and the sectarian rifts are as apparent as ever 15 years after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The election of a new prime minister and parliament also takes place the same week U.S. President Donald Trump announced he was pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, raising tensions between Iraq’s two main allies: Tehran and Washington.

A female security member casts her vote at a polling station two days before polls open to the public in a parliamentary election in Baghdad, Iraq May 10, 2018. REUTERS/Thaier al-Sudani

A female security member casts her vote at a polling station two days before polls open to the public in a parliamentary election in Baghdad, Iraq May 10, 2018. REUTERS/Thaier al-Sudani

Whoever wins the May 12 election will face the challenge of rebuilding Iraq after four years of war with Islamic State, jump-starting a flagging economy, balancing the interests of powerful foreign patrons and maintaining the country’s fragile unity in the face of sectarian and separatist tensions.

“We want security. We have killings, theft, kidnappings. We never had this before. In the past 15 years the people have been destroyed,” said 29-year-old Khalid Radi, a laborer in Baghdad.

Incumbent Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is considered by analysts to be marginally ahead but victory is far from certain.

Even though he announced Islamic State’s defeat during his first four-year term, diffused sectarian tensions enflamed by his predecessor, and maintained Iraq’s unity in the face of a Kurdish independence bid, he faces a tough battle.

THREE-WAY RACE

Abadi has faced criticism about persistent government corruption, tough economic conditions and the austerity measures his cabinet introduced after the slide in global oil prices and to help pay for the fight against Islamic State.

He also cannot rely solely on votes from his community as the majority Shi’ite voter base is unusually split this year. Instead, he is looking to draw upon support from other groups.

Many, but not all, Sunnis see Abadi as a less sectarian alternative to his two main Shi’ite rivals and credit him with liberating their areas from Islamic State.

There’s bad blood between Abadi and the Kurds, however, after Baghdad imposed sanctions on the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region following its failed independence bid last year.

Even if Abadi’s Victory Alliance list wins the most seats he still has to navigate the long-winded and complicated backroom negotiations required to form a coalition government.

His two main challengers are his predecessor Nuri al-Maliki and Iranian-backed Shi’ite militia commander Hadi al-Amiri.

Both have a more passionate voter base than Abadi, who is mostly appealing to more pragmatic voters who see him as having better relations with the outside world and a cross-sectarian appeal needed to avoid further bloodshed and attract investment.

Like Abadi, Amiri is running on a platform highlighting the victory against Islamic State, though the militia leader’s narrative is more compelling as he was a frontline commander and is viewed as war hero by many Shi’ites.

Maliki, who was sidelined after eight years in office in 2014 after losing a third of the country to Islamic State, is looking to make a political comeback.

In contrast to the cross-sectarian message of Abadi, Maliki is again posing as Iraq’s Shi’ite champion and is proposing to do away with the country’s unofficial power-sharing model in which all the main parties have cabinet representatives.

COALITION HORSE-TRADING

Ever since Saddam fell in 2003, ending decades of dominance by the Sunni minority, senior government positions have been unofficially split between the country’s main groups.

The post of prime minister has been reserved for a Shi’ite, the speaker for a Sunni, and the ceremonial presidency has gone to a Kurd – with all three being chosen by parliament.

More than 7,000 candidates in 18 provinces, or governorates, are running this year for 329 parliamentary seats.

The Iraqi constitution sets a 90-day deadline for forming a government after the election results are formally announced and the horse-trading can be protracted.

The new government will also have to cope with the simmering tension between the United States and Iran.

As prime minister, Abadi has won praise for his deft juggling of the competing and colliding interests of his two main backers. While his government maintains good relations with Iran, he is seen as balanced and Western diplomats say he would be the easiest candidate to work with.

Maliki, who pushed for U.S. troop withdrawals and Amiri, who speaks fluent Farsi and spent years in exile in Iran during the Saddam Hussein era, are both seen as much closer to Tehran.

DIVISIONS ALL ROUND

The election is also taking place in an atmosphere of division and disillusionment within Iraq’s three main groups.

The Shi’ite vote is split as many are unhappy with their leaders after 15 years in power that have only yielded violence and unemployment and left the country’s infrastructure crumbling.

But if the Shi’ites are split because they have too many leaders, Sunni Arabs are divided because they have none.

Sunnis are at their lowest point yet. Millions languish in displacement camps, many are out of pocket and trying to rebuild destroyed homes in cities reduced to rubble – and they feel collectively branded as Islamic State sympathizers.

The Sunni politicians that have held positions in government are largely discredited and there is no national Sunni leadership or party structure.

Iraq’s Kurds, meanwhile, blame their leaders for gambling away hard-won autonomy in the failed independence referendum and might punish them by voting for non-traditional parties, which in turn could undermine the historically unified Kurdish bloc’s position as kingmakers in parliament.

Voters go to the polls on Saturday, though security forces and Iraqis abroad started voting on Thursday. The electoral commission has said results will come “hours” after polls close.

Islamic State has threatened to attack polling stations amid a recent uptick in security incidents in areas retaken from the militants while many voters simply do not feel the election will bring any change.

“I propose the state just cancel parliament. Shake it and uproot it,” said 27-year-old mechanic Mustafa Tabbar using a popular Iraqi phrase meaning radical change.

(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; editing by David Clarke)