“Cooperation isn’t just in business ether,” al-Qubaisi adds. “There was also a lot of information being shared. I believe this is how the IS group was able to get a lot of different information about local people and local security. That’s how the city fell to the IS group more than once.”
Al-Qubaisi doesn’t support the IS group and he and other locals have passed information about traders to the authorities. “But every time we do, they tell us they already know that all this is going on and that they’re monitoring the business the IS group doing here,” al-Qubaisi notes.
In general Rutba is an important stop on the road going through Anbar’s desert. Most of the people there work in trade or transportation and some of them have made a lot of money. The IS group has apparently also been targeting these wealthier individuals for extortion, in the same way they once did in Mosul, before they took that city over in 2014.
The district is a very important commercial area in Anbar, Rutba’s mayor, Imad al-Dulaimi, told NIQASH. “And the IS group has been able to exploit this, by blackmailing locals and securing trade routes.”
His own security forces are powerless against the IS group’s activities outside of the city. “Our security only goes about 150 meters outside the city borders,” he complains. “It’s like we are exiles from Iraq in the desert. The failure of the Iraqi government to re-open and maintain the border crossings, and their failure to control security in the Anbar desert, are the main reasons that business for the IS group is so good here.”
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