Murder of Sunni man in Mosul signals alarming ethnic tensions after ISIS
“I begged them not to harm Hamid,” she says, her voice trembling with emotion. “They said they would shoot me too if I continued to follow them,” as the gunmen forcefully dragged her ill-fated son out into the street.
Hamid Khalaf, a Sunni, was later found dead in Mosul with gunshot wounds to his head.
Eyewitnesses who have seen the killing describe the event as a “summary execution” with several gunmen firing at Hamid at close range.
“They told us he was Daesh and then they killed him. They first shot at his head, blowing his brain out. Then they left. Then they returned and fired a second bullet into his back,” Bassam Umar, one of the eyewitnesses who happened to be at the cite of the killing, told Rudaw.
Hamid’s brothers say that he had been a devoted father and deny their brother had any links with the Islamic militants.
Although Iraqi police units are accompanying the advancing army into Mosul to restore public order in liberated neighborhoods of the city, no official investigations have so far been launched to find the perpetrators.
The family, however, say they suspect gunmen affiliated with the Shiite militia to have carried out the murder.
Mosul, a overwhelmingly Sunni city with sizeable Kurdish population and modest Shiite neighborhoods, has long been viewed as an ethnically volatile region with religious conflicts, occasionally culminating in fatal standoffs, covering much of its past history.
Sunni leaders have in the past warned against Shiite affiliated groups to take part in the Mosul operation, fearing a backlash from the Sunni population and exploited by ISIS militants.
The recent hoisting of Shiite flag on the shrine of Nabi Younis, highly revered by both Christians and Muslims, however, has not only added to menacing religious tensions in the half-liberated city, it also worryingly signals lasting ethnic conflicts that could spread else where in a country already devastated by multiple wars over the past three decades.
The troops raised a giant Iraqi flag on the hill of Nabi Younis cemetery on Friday as the sign of their victory over ISIS and one soldier told Rudaw that people in Mosul should not fear—even though they were Shiites—because they had only come to free their city from ISIS.