With help from non-ISIS Sunnis.
KIRKUK, Iraq (AP) — The insurgents came at midday, walking across a canal, advancing under cover of mortar fire toward the cluster of three Iraqi villages.
Within eight hours, Shiite residents who fled said the Sunni insurgents had expelled thousands of them from the majority-Sunni province, helped by local Sunnis in neighboring villages.
“You cannot imagine what happened, only if you saw it could you believe it,” said Hassan Ali, a 52-year-old farmer siting in the al-Zahra Shiite mosque, used to distribute aid in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, where the displaced had fled, some 50 miles (80 kilometers) away.
“They hit us with mortars and mortars, and the families fled, and they kept hitting us. It was completely sectarian. The Shiites, out,” he said.
The attacks took place on June 16 in the neighboring villages of Chardaghli, Brawchi and Karanaz, as well as a fourth village, Beshir, some 30 miles (50 kilometers) to the north, said the displaced residents. All places were home to Shiite Turkmen, an ethnically distinct minority who speak their own language and are scattered through Iraq.
Over a dozen displaced residents in Kirkuk and the nearby Shiite Turkmen town of Taza Khormato gave The Associated Press near identical accounts of the expulsions. It was not possible, however, to independently confirm the incidents because Sunni insurgents now control of the villages.
The expulsions show how Iraq’s sectarian mosaic is unraveling in particularly hateful ways, unseen since the mid-2000s when sectarian killings nearly plunged the country into civil war.
The difference this time around is the lack of a U.S. military presence. At the time, when Iraq spiraled toward a sectarian civil war, U.S.-led troops fought both Sunni and Shiite extremists, eventually brokering an uneasy peace until foreign troops withdrew in 2011.
The expulsions appeared to be part of a plan to create a Sunni-dominated territory from the Syrian border to Baghdad’s edge.
The rough plan appears to have emerged after insurgents, led by fighters of the al-Qaida inspired Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, began sweeping through Iraq on June 9, seizing the country’s second largest city of Mosul and heading southward into Iraq’s Sunni heartland.
The three Turkmen Shiite villages were in Salahuddin, a central province that links the west to the capital.
Expulsions from those villages were preceded, just days earlier, by insurgents seizing the Turkmen-dominated city of Tal Afar near the Syrian border. There, they burnt down Shiite homes.
The Islamic State fighters consider Shiites to be heretics, and proudly post images of them being killed — often for no reason other than their beliefs.