ISIL’s smouldering footprint in Qayyara
Billowing clouds of smoke cloaked the sun, orange flames sprang dozens of feet into the sky, and the stench of petrol hung in the air. Everywhere Muhamed Oussama looked, it was apocalyptic. For several months, this was the daily grind for Oussama, a 38-year-old Iraqi firefighter from Kirkuk. Oussama, who works for the firefighting division […]Dorian Geiger writes for Al-Jazeera:
Billowing clouds of smoke cloaked the sun, orange flames sprang dozens of feet into the sky, and the stench of petrol hung in the air. Everywhere Muhamed Oussama looked, it was apocalyptic.
For several months, this was the daily grind for Oussama, a 38-year-old Iraqi firefighter from Kirkuk.
Oussama, who works for the firefighting division of the Iraqi civil defence department, was one of hundreds of Iraqi firefighters on the front lines, extinguishing dozens of massive oil fires that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) set last summer during the group's retreat from Qayyara to Mosul. The infernos transformed the oil-rich Qayyara region and its countryside into a fiery hellscape.
