Islamic State believed behind crop fires in Iraq's disputed territories
The Islamic State is suspected of once again setting fire to farmland in the disputed Iraqi-Kurdish territories.
Crops are burning in northern Iraq’s disputed territories again and locals are mobilizing to fight the suspected culprit, the Islamic State.
A local commander in the Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) said there were massive fires yesterday in Makhmour, south of Mosul and the Kurdish capital Erbil.
“The damage is widespread,” Abu Jafar al-Shabaki, leader of the PMU’s 30th Brigade, said on Al-Nujaba TV.
Makhmour is one of the disputed northern Iraqi territories claimed by both the federal government in Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Erbil. IS took several of these territories, which are also in and around oil-rich Kirkuk and north of Mosul, in 2014. The Kurdish peshmerga defeated IS in many of them, but lost the areas in 2017 to Iraqi security forces after the Kurdistan independence referendum.
