Rocket hits football stadium in Daquq, killing six
Six people were killed and four others were wounded by the rockets, according to Daquq Mayor Sheikh Lewis Sindi.
“The rockets fell on a local football stadium, when the young men were playing,” Sindi told Rudaw on Sunday.
Most of the casualties were young men, and one was a police officer, according to Sindi. There are no investigations ongoing, he said.
“Until now the Iraqi federal police have not started investigations nor started operations to arrest the perpetrators,” said Sindi.
Zain al-Abdeen is a majority Turkmen village, according to Sindi.
Graphic: Sarkawt Mohammed | Rudaw English, Maps4news
In a Facebook post, Iraqi Turkmen lawmaker Ershad Salihi said he believes that the attacks on Zain al-Abdeen had a “political” agenda, without specifying what that means.
It is still unknown if the Islamic State (ISIS) are behind the rocket attacks. Sindi believes ISIS was the perpetrator.
“Daesh is responsible for those attacks on the town,” he said, using the Arabic-language acronym for the group.
On its Telegram channels, ISIS claimed it carried out attacks on federal police in the Diyala province on Saturday.
ISIS sleeper cells often attack disputed areas between Erbil and Baghdad like Daquq, especially Diyala and villages and towns south of Kirkuk.
Kurds and Arabs in Iraq’s disputed territories have been locked in disputes over land ownership since former President Saddam Hussein implemented a series of Arabization policies there, where land belonging to Kurds and Turkmen was seized and reassigned to Iraqi Arabs.
Under the Iraqi constitution, Kirkuk province is considered a disputed territory claimed by both Erbil and Baghdad, as are parts of the Diyala, Nineveh, and Saladin provinces.
In the aftermath of the Kurdish independence referendum of September 2017, the Iraqi Army and Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF, otherwise known as Hashd al-Shaabi) launched an offensive against Kurdish Peshmerga forces in the oil-rich province of Kirkuk and the other parts of the disputed areas and retook most of them.
Since then, the disputed areas, suffering from a resulting security vacuum that has allowed ISIS to thrive, have borne witness to multiple car bombs and the torching of large swathes of land in the Nineveh, Saladin and Kirkuk provinces. ISIS has claimed responsibility for much of the arson through its own press outlets. Ambushes, kidnappings, extortion and arson have also taken place in these areas.
In July, the Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi announced during a press conference that the Iraqi Defense Ministry and Erbil’s Peshmerga Ministry reached an agreement regarding security in the disputed areas.
However, the deal has yet to be implemented and Peshmerga forces have not returned to the disputed territories.