Isil recruitment of Kurds could pose danger

Halabja: This town near the Iranian border has long been a symbol of Kurdish resistance, and it is best known as the site of a gruesome chemical-weapons attack by Saddam Hussain in 1988.

These days, residents say, it’s increasingly known for something else — though few want to talk about it.

Kurdish authorities say a small contingent of Kurdish youth - around 150 in all, about a third of whom are from Halabja - has in recent months joined the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), which has seized a vast swath of Iraqi territory.

The young men’s allegiance to the extremist militant group represents a potential danger for the Kurds, who share the jihadists’ resentment of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government but who are wary of the extremists now massed on the edge of their territory. The Kurds have hoped to keep their largely autonomous region in northern Iraq from getting tangled up in the country’s increasingly bloody conflict.

Some Kurdish intelligence officials fear that with Isil’s gains, more local boys will join the jihadists, and the radical ideology could creep beyond Arab Iraq and into Iraqi Kurdistan, which has so far remained an oasis of calm and order.

The presence of Kurdish fighters in the extremist militant group highlights how effectively Isil’s recruitment efforts are reaching disenfranchised youth across Iraq’s ethnic divide. Most Kurds are Sunni Muslims, like the insurgents, but have their own language and culture.

A top local intelligence official in Halabja, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Isil is already operating “cells” inside this town, appealing to bored and underemployed young people to join their fight.

Most of the 52 local men and boys who have left Halabja in the past year and a half to fight in Syria have been recruited by Isil, he said.

One local man, Mariwan Hallabji, has become an Isil commander and is currently manning a front line against Kurdish peshmerga security forces outside the city of Kirkuk, the official said.

“How do we guarantee that when they’re done fighting the Shiites, they don’t start waging a war against the Kurds?” the intelligence official said.

A little over a decade ago, Islamist radicals with alleged ties to Al Qaida had a base here and fought against the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of the two major Kurdish political movements, before US forces bombed the Islamists’ bases during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Halabja, though relatively far from the front line between Iraqi Kurdistan and Isil-held territory, is particularly vulnerable to losing its sons to the radical group, local officials and residents said.

The town lacks jobs and educational opportunities and has a history of militant resistance to the Arab government in Baghdad, residents said. Almost every family has a “martyr,” either from the Kurds’ struggle for independence or from the chemical weapons attack in 1988, which killed thousands. Hussain’s forces attacked the town because of its sympathy for Iran during the Iran-Iraq war.

The situation has deteriorated since Al Maliki’s government, in a dispute with the Kurdistan Regional Government, slashed the Kurds’ budget six months ago, halting the payment of salaries to many workers.

“People here are graduating from high school, and they think they have no future,” the intelligence official said. In the Western world, depressed teenagers commit suicide, he added. “People here join Isil — which is also basically suicide.”

“Z,” whose name is being withheld at the request of his family, would seem an unlikely recruit for Isil, which has enforced a brutal interpretation of Islamic law, executing hundreds of Shiites and others in its bid to establish an Islamic caliphate that spans Iraq and Syria.

“He had a motorbike. He had a girlfriend. He had lots of friends,” Z’s brother-in-law said with a bitter laugh one recent night, as the family sat on the hard, thinly carpeted floor of their modest living room.

But Z’s family think he was enticed by the extremists’ slick social media campaign and by local recruiters.

Photos on Z’s sister’s cellphone show a grinning 16-year-old boy with a fluffy black “faux-hawk,” the latest hairstyle craze.

His family said Z was not especially religious and was never particularly interested in going to the mosque. But in mid-May, he suddenly left Halabja with his best friend to join Isil in Syria, his relatives said. “In one week, he changed completely,” his brother-in-law said.

After last week’s rapid Isil advance into Iraq, Z is now with fellow militants in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the family said.

Two intelligence officials, as well as residents of Halabja, said Kurdish authorities have allowed young people like Z to leave the region, in part because they think it is safer without them.

“They want them out of here. They don’t want the bomb to explode in their hands,” said a second intelligence official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.

In one recent instance, the bomb nearly did go off.

In late May, a young Kurdish man from Halabja who had recently returned from fighting with Isil in Syria was apprehended by local security forces as he tried to enter a Shiite shrine in the Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah, carrying a backpack containing explosives, officials said.

Friends and relatives of a few other young men who have returned say the authorities have sought to put them through a lengthy reverse-”brainwashing” process to persuade them to abandon their radical beliefs. Then the men are heavily monitored.

“Those who come back are taken through a very intense process to ensure that they have left those thoughts behind,” said Fazil Basharati, a Halabja local and former member of parliament from the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

Relatives of fighters who are either with Isil or have left the group and returned said that Kurdish security forces have ordered them not to speak about their family members’ ties to the group because it draws attention to the issue.

“They don’t let them talk about it,” said one 24-year-old man in Halabja, who grew up with the Kurdish member of Isil who tried to blow up the shrine in Sulaymaniyah. The 24-year-old man, who did not want to give his name, said two of his other neighbours had joined the extremist group in Syria, only to be captured and returned by Turkish Kurds who are fighting with Syrian insurgents opposed to Isil. The man said his cousin was also killed fighting in Syria four months ago.

Z’s brother-in-law recently implored the 16-year-old over the phone to return to his mother and sister. “I said, ‘What if someone tries to harass them?’ He told me: ‘We have plenty of Isil people in Halabja to stop them.’ “