Why Baghdad Can Never Truly Be Secure

Just like Yusufiyah, Tarimiyah is located on the outskirts of Baghdad. Along with Latifiyah, Madaen and Arab Jabour in the south, Abu Ghraib in the west and Mushahada and Taji to the north, these areas make up what’s known as the Baghdad belt. In the past, these more rural areas provided shelter to the extremist organisation, Al Qaeda in Iraq. Now the same areas are being used by the new incarnation of the latter, the Islamic State group.

In the distant past Baghdad’s belt was a mainly agricultural area, supplying a lot of produce and dairy products to the capital. Residents of Baghdad used to take trips out to the countryside to escape city life but today locals tend to avoid these areas.

As it is, it’s not particularly easy to come here anymore anyway. There are dozens of checkpoints, some just 500 meters apart. Yet somehow the area still isn’t safe.

After a series of suicide bombings in these areas, which targeted Shiite Muslim mosques, Qais al-Khazali, the leader of one of Iraq’s more controversial Shiite Muslim militias, noted that it was more important to secure these areas than fighting for the distant northern city of Mosul.

“The Islamic State is using the city’s outskirts as camps, housing hundreds of fighters and suicide bombers and to make car bombs,” al-Khazali said during a television interview.

“The Islamic State has started to return to the outskirts of Baghdad after being defeated around Anbar province,” says Hassan Mohsen al-Saadi, an MP affiliated with the Shiite Muslim Badr bloc in Parliament. “The Islamic State group wants to threaten Baghdad and in doing so, cause the Iraqi security forces and the volunteer militias to retreat to Baghdad, leaving more distant fronts uncontested.”