To Mosul and back: Sunni Arabs seek place in a shifting Iraq
When Kurdish forces began rounding up his relatives and friends, 23-year-old Iraqi Omar Abdallah fled with his pregnant wife and four brothers to Mosul. At the time, life under Islamic State seemed preferable for the Sunni Arab to indefinite detention. That was shortly after the ultra-hardline Sunni group captured large areas of northern Iraq in […]John Davison writes for Reuters:
When Kurdish forces began rounding up his relatives and friends, 23-year-old Iraqi Omar Abdallah fled with his pregnant wife and four brothers to Mosul. At the time, life under Islamic State seemed preferable for the Sunni Arab to indefinite detention.
That was shortly after the ultra-hardline Sunni group captured large areas of northern Iraq in the summer in 2014, and despite its reputation for brutality, Abdallah says it remained a relatively unknown quantity to his family.
Now, Abdallah, Maha and their two infant children have fled again. They huddle in the desert a short distance northeast of Mosul, Iraq's second city, where government forces are fighting to drive out Islamic State in an offensive involving Kurdish fighters and Shi'ite militias.
