Bloody Power Struggles continue in Disputed Territories

Sheikh Thaer al-Bayyati, the tribal spokesman for Salahuddin province and head of the prominent Albu Hassan clan, told Al-Monitor in an interview in Erbil that Amerli had been “extremely sectarian” and that members of the Albu Hassan clan had once saved Amerli’s life when IS was in the area in 2014.

Bayyati said, “He was traveling in a convoy of eight national police cars toward Amerli,” a Shiite-majority town in the area the police chief was born, “and would have ended up at an IS checkpoint if we hadn’t stopped him and shown him another route out.”

And now, he noted bitterly, most members of the Albu Hassan clan — which he said accounts for about 10,000 of the approximately 85,000 members of the al-Bayyat tribe across Iraq — are living in camps almost two years after their areas in Tuz Khormato and other parts of Salahuddin province were retaken from IS.

“Even I can’t go back, or I will be killed,” he said. “We know exactly how many of our tribe have joined IS: 263 people. We have their names and at least 3,600 members of the tribe have been arrested.”

Although there is no reliable data on the ethnic composition of the city prior to the problems with IS and subsequent arming of Shiite groups as part of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s fatwa to take up arms shortly after IS took Mosul in June 2014, Amerli had told Al-Monitor in the May interview that most of the population in the city was Shiite Turkmen.