Violence and deep division will continue to imperil Iraqi civilians long after Islamic State (IS) is driven out from the territory it captured, according to a lengthy dispatch from the devastated Iraqi city of Fallujah.
After The Caliphate, published on BuzzFeed, quotes a senior official in Fallujah, Taleb al-Hosnawi, warning that IS is “trying to set up sleeper cells”.
Within Iraq’s vast western Anbar Province, a bitter divide has emerged “between those who fought ISIS and those who accommodated them”, writes Borzou Daragahi.
He says that unofficial (“kangaroo”) courts “administer harsh and speedy justice” and that the state is too “overwhelmed and cash-strapped” to start the rebuilding of Iraq’s bombed-out cities.
A local tribal sheikh adds that reviving the northern city of Mosul, to where many of the thousands of expelled Christians are wanting to return, could be made more difficult by its former mix of ethnicities and faiths.