The Wars After The War For Sinjar: How Washington Can Avert A New Civil War
While the frontline with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) lies only 4.5 kilometers south of Sinjar, a potentially more dangerous threat looms much closer to home. Parts of northern Sinjar — a district separated by the now-infamous 70-kilometer-long mountain — were liberated in December 2014. The district center south of the […]Christine Mccaffray Van Den Toorn writes for War on the Rocks:
While the frontline with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) lies only 4.5 kilometers south of Sinjar, a potentially more dangerous threat looms much closer to home. Parts of northern Sinjar — a district separated by the now-infamous 70-kilometer-long mountain — were liberated in December 2014. The district center south of the mountain was cleared of ISIL in November 2015. A mixture of forces — independent Yezidis, Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Peshmerga — took part in both operations, but ISIL still occupies the southern villages of Sinjar.
As I discovered during a number of visits to the town over the last 18 months, Sinjar is rapidly becoming a playground for proxy struggles between regional rivals fighting zero-sum confrontations. Amid these battles, local Yezidis – a religious minority group numbering around 500,000 in Iraq which makes up the large the majority of the population of Sinjar – are being forced to choose sides. These dynamics are common across many of the territories liberated from ISIL, as competing factions push and pull local populations in their struggle for power. Within Sinjar, these forces risk igniting an internecine conflict among Yezidis that could be just as dangerous as the ISIL invasion of their territory in August 2014.
