Disir
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- Sep 30, 2011
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“We are very much scared,” says Hamid Aftan al-Hammad, an Albu Nimr tribesman from the city of Hit in western Iraq. “At night we lie on the roofs of our houses with our weapons waiting to be attacked again.”
He fears the return of Isis, which massacred at least 864 members of his tribe when they controlled the area where they live – a city a hundred miles west of Baghdad in the middle of the vast Sunni Arab province of Anbar, which sprawls across western Iraq.
Mr Hammad points to a patch of open ground between the palm trees on the far bank of the Euphrates river, which divides Hit.
“It was there that they killed 45 of our people,” he says, going on to list those members of his immediate family who were murdered, including two teenage cousins executed in the main square of the city and two uncles who tried to escape into the desert but have disappeared and are assumed to have been captured and killed by Isis.
Compared even to the many other Isis atrocities, the hunting down of the Albu Nimr, a pro-government Sunni tribe, was relentless and genocidal.
Sala Segur Omar al-Nimr, a teacher who lived through the final months of his tribe’s resistance, described how they dug trenches and built sand barriers in a hopeless attempt to defend themselves, but it was not enough.
For this Iraqi tribe massacred by Isis, the fear never truly goes away
Just wait to you get to the part about the houses.
He fears the return of Isis, which massacred at least 864 members of his tribe when they controlled the area where they live – a city a hundred miles west of Baghdad in the middle of the vast Sunni Arab province of Anbar, which sprawls across western Iraq.
Mr Hammad points to a patch of open ground between the palm trees on the far bank of the Euphrates river, which divides Hit.
“It was there that they killed 45 of our people,” he says, going on to list those members of his immediate family who were murdered, including two teenage cousins executed in the main square of the city and two uncles who tried to escape into the desert but have disappeared and are assumed to have been captured and killed by Isis.
Compared even to the many other Isis atrocities, the hunting down of the Albu Nimr, a pro-government Sunni tribe, was relentless and genocidal.
Sala Segur Omar al-Nimr, a teacher who lived through the final months of his tribe’s resistance, described how they dug trenches and built sand barriers in a hopeless attempt to defend themselves, but it was not enough.
For this Iraqi tribe massacred by Isis, the fear never truly goes away
Just wait to you get to the part about the houses.
