Cars form long queues in front of petrol stations in Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul — a city in an oil-producing country that suffers from petrol shortages. This is one of the consequences of the presence of Shiite militias in this Sunni-majority city, which they liberated from the Islamic State (IS) in 2017.

“It feels like a new occupation,” says engineer Muaamar Sameer Saadoon, who imports and installs electrical appliances in Mosul. His company only just survived the IS occupation, and the liberation hasn’t brought much relief. “Daesh demanded a percentage on the earnings of companies like mine,” he says, using the local abbreviation for IS. “With Daesh, that was ten percent. Now, we have to pay 14 to 15 percent to the militias.”

For IS, extortion was an important source of income, and Al-Qaeda engaged in it before them, as did the Iraqi security forces. The difference now, says Saadoon, is that before IS took over in 2014, the fear of being caught restrained civil servants. But when IS openly asked for money — in their vocabulary, "taxes" — for a host of things, that fear soon evaporated. “It got to the stage where IS teamed up with the civil servants, and took part of the extortion money.” 

He has no choice but to pay, as otherwise he will be unable to get his goods past the checkpoints, which the militias also run, controlling access to the city. Which also explains how tankers full of petrol that Mosul receives from Iraq’s refineries can leave the city again, to be sold in the Kurdistan Region or even in Iran. And as the militias get rich, Mosul’s civilians queue.