In a town brutalized by IS, Iraq tests its power

(24 Dec 2020) LEAD IN:
Iraq's army is deployed in Sinjar for the first time since the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein.
The move in the northern Iraqi town, home to Iraq's Yazidi religious minority, is the result of a deal that the federal government spent months making.

STORY-LINE:
Much of the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar, once brutalized by the Islamic State group, is still deserted and in ruins.
Iraq's federal government spent months making a deal to restore order from a tangled web of paramilitaries, who sowed chaos in the district during the bedlam following liberation from IS three years ago.
This month, Iraq's army deployed there for the first time since the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein.
The flags belonging to a patchwork of armed forces were lowered in the town and were replaced by the fluttering of just one: The Iraqi state's.
Iraqi army soldiers are now patrolling in the city's centre and the deserted ruins of Sinjar's old town, vacant since IS was dislodged.
The Yazidis, traumatized by the mass killing and enslavement that IS unleashed against them, have mixed feelings about the deal.
One of them, Ali Khalaf, said he accepts "the deployment of army and police in Sinjar to prevent problems and instabilities."
The militias policing Sinjar the past three years are a mix.
They include peshmerga fighters from Iraq's Kurdish autonomy zone, as well as the outlawed Kurdish guerrilla group, known as PKK, and its affiliate made up of local Yazidi fighters, called the Sinjar Resistance Units or YBS.
There are also Yazidi units belonging to the Popular Mobilization Forces, an umbrella group of state-sanctioned paramilitaries created in 2014 to defeat IS.
There are signs of recovery in Sinjar.
Its city center is hummed with shoppers and merchants.
More of the 200,000 Yazidis displaced by the 2014 IS onslaught are coming back — some 21,600 returning between June to September, many times the rate of previous years.
But scratch the surface, and almost everyone harbors raw, unresolved trauma of IS attack that murdered fathers and sons, enslaved thousands of women and sent survivors fleeing up Sinjar mountain.
The Iraqi military will secure the area for now, with other factions leaving their positions, although many remain in the Sinjar area.
Under the plan, the Kurdish authority is to appoint a mayor — a prospect many Yazidis oppose — and local police are eventually to take over security, working under the government's intelligence agency and National Security Adviser.
The plan calls for 2,500 new security personnel to be hired locally.

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