Kirkuk Extremists Vie for Power, Money

And when ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced the change, he also managed to attract a number of other extremist organizations on side. Not Ansar al-Sunna however – over the past few years, the organization has been under the leadership of former Iraqi army officers loyal to Saddam Hussein and it has evolved somewhat differently.

According to information from senior security staff in Kirkuk, the Al Qaeda-connected ISIS has been trying to dominate Ansar al-Sunna for months. In armed conflicts centred in the Hawija district, about 50 kilometres south of Kirkuk, the two groups have been assassinating one another, launching attacks and even leaking information on the other’s activities so local security forces can apprehend them.

Kirkuk police records show 21 confrontations between the two groups over the past five months, which have claimed the lives of 30 people, most of them apparently ISIS fighters.

“Most of the Ansar al-Sunna members are former Baathist officers and they have deep differences with Al Qaeda,” Sarhad Qader, the commander of police forces in Kirkuk province, told NIQASH. “The main reasons for the differences are money and the struggle for power in this region.”

Surveillance of the groups showed that, just as with street gangs elsewhere, it wasn’t possible for members of one group to join another organization. “If one of their members walks out and joins another organization, he may very well be killed,” Qader says. “If he’s not killed then his former group might try and kill someone from his new group in retaliation. This kind of thing leads to a deterioration in any relationship between the two groups.”