|
 A wheat farmer from outside Mosul, Paulis and his family fled the
militant group Islamic State early last month. The group overran the
family farm as part of its offensive that captured vast swathes of
territory in northern Iraq. Two weeks later, Paulis, who is a
Christian, received a phone call from a man who said he was an
Islamic State fighter.
“We are in your warehouse. Why are you not here working and taking
care of your business?” the man asked in formal Arabic. “Come back
and we will guarantee your safety. But you must convert and pay
$500.”
When Paulis refused, the man spelled out the penalty. “We are taking
your wheat,” he said. “Just to let you know we are not stealing it
because we gave you a choice.”
Other fleeing farmers recount similar stories, and point to a
little-discussed element of the threat Islamic State poses to Iraq
and the region.
The group now controls a large chunk of Iraq’s wheat supplies. The
United Nations estimates land under IS control accounts for as much
as 40 percent of Iraq’s annual production of wheat, one of the
country’s most important food staples alongside barley and rice. The
militants seem intent not just on grabbing more land but also on
managing resources and governing in their self-proclaimed caliphate.
Wheat is one tool at their disposal. The group has begun using the
grain to fill its pockets, to deprive opponents – especially members
of the Christian and Yazidi minorities – of vital food supplies, and
to win over fellow Sunni Muslims as it tightens its grip on captured
territory. In Iraq’s northern breadbasket, much as it did in
neighboring Syria, IS has kept state employees and wheat silo
operators in place to help run its empire.
Such tactics are one reason IS poses a more complex threat than al
Qaeda, the Islamist group from which it grew. For most of its
existence, al Qaeda has focused on hit-and-run attacks and suicide
bombings. But Islamic State sees itself as both army and government.
“Wheat is a strategic good. They are doing as much as they can with
it,” said Ali Bind Dian, head of a farmers’ union in Makhmur, a town
near IS-held territory between Arbil and Mosul.
“Definitely they want to show off and pretend they are a
government.”
The Sunni militants and their allies now occupy more than a third of
Iraq and a similar chunk of neighboring Syria. The group generates
income not just from wheat but also from “taxes” on business owners,
looting, ransoming kidnapped Westerners and, most especially, the
sale of oil to local traders. Oil brings in millions of dollars
every month, according to estimates by Luay Al-Khatteeb, a visiting
fellow at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. That helps finance IS
military operations – and is why IS-held oilfields in Syria are
targets in U.S.-led airstrikes.
“Islamic State presents itself as exactly that, a state, and in
order to be able to sustain that image and that presentation, which
is critical for continued recruitment and legitimacy, it depends on
a sustainable source of income," said Charles Lister, another
visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center.
SEIZING CROPS AND LIVESTOCK
In early August, Kurdish farmer Saeed Mustafa Hussein watched
through binoculars as armed IS militants shovelled wheat onto four
trucks, then drove off in the direction of Arab villages. Hussein
said he does not know what became of his wheat. But he knows that IS
runs flour mills in areas it controls and he believes that his wheat
was likely milled and sold.
He had 54 tonnes of wheat on his farm in the village of Pungina,
northeast of Arbil, wheat he had been unable to sell to a government
silo or private traders because of fighting in the area.
The militants also took 200 chickens and 36 prized pigeons.
"What made it worse was that I was helpless to prevent this, I
couldn’t do anything. They took two generators from the village that
we had recently received from the Kurdish government after a very
long process," said Hussein.
Residents are too scared to return even though Kurdish fighters are
now in control. "We think the Islamic State laid mines to keep us
from going back," said neighbor Abdullah Namiq Mahmoud.
There are scores of similar stories at displacement camps across
Kurdistan.
"We escaped with our money and gold but left our wheat and furniture
and everything else," said farmer and primary school teacher Younis
Saidullah, 62, a member of the tiny Kakaiya minority.
"Everything we built for 20 years using my salary and our farming:
It's all gone. We are back to zero," he said, sitting on the floor
of a tent at a United Nations-run camp on the outskirts of Arbil.
MILITARY AND ECONOMIC POWER
After Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait triggered Western
sanctions, the then-Iraqi dictator built a comprehensive subsidised
food distribution system in Iraq. That was expanded under the United
Nations’ Oil-for-Food program. Joy Gordon, a political philosophy
professor at Fairfield University in Connecticut and author of the
2010 book “Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions,”
estimates that two-thirds of Iraqis “were dependent primarily or
entirely” on food subsidies between 1990 and 2003.
The system survived the U.S. invasion and years of violence. Now
fully run by the Iraqi government, it has been plagued in recent
years by “irregular (food) distributions” that have cut dependency,
according to a June report by the United Nations' Food and
Agriculture Organization. A former U.S. Department of Agriculture
economist estimates that about quarter of Iraqis living in rural
areas were dependent on subsidised food before the latest violence,
while another quarter used it to top up food they bought.
IS is demonstrating that controlling wheat brings power. As its
fighters swept through Iraq’s north in June, they seized control of
silos and grain stockpiles. The offensive coincided with the wheat
and barley harvests and, crucially, the delivery of crops to
government silos and private traders.
IS now controls all nine silos in Nineveh Province, which spans the
Tigris river, along with seven other silos in other provinces. In
the three months since overrunning Nineveh’s provincial capital
Mosul, IS fighters have forced out hundreds of thousands of ethnic
and religious minorities and seized hundreds of thousands of tonnes
of wheat from abandoned fields.
A SILO UNDER ATTACK
One target was the wheat silo in Makhmur, a town between the cities
of Mosul and Kirkuk. The silo has a capacity of 250,000 tonnes, or
approximately 8 percent of Iraq’s domestic annual production in
2013.
IS attacked Makhmur on August 7. But even in the weeks before that,
the group had found a way into the silo and the Iraqi state
procurement system.
Abdel Rizza Qadr Ahmed, head of the silo, believes that IS forced
local farmers to mix wheat produced in other, IS-controlled areas
into their own harvest. The farmers then sold it to Makhmur as if it
all had been grown locally. In the weeks before the attack, the silo
purchased almost 14,000 more tonnes than it had in 2013. That extra
wheat is worth approximately $9.5 million at the artificially high
price Baghdad pays farmers.
Ahmed believes IS was looking to make money from the wheat and
ensure there was bread available for Sunnis in the areas it
controlled.
Ahmed said it was not his job to investigate the source of the
grain, just to buy it. “We just take the wheat from the farmers and
we don't ask 'Where did you get this from?'" he said.
Huner Baba, local director general of agriculture, said he too
believed that traders and farmers had sold wheat from outside the
region.
But Baghdad usually pays its wheat farmers around two months after
they deposit their produce and so wheat farmers around Makhmur – and
therefore IS – had not yet been paid by the time IS militants
entered the town on June 7 and, according to Baba, headed for the
silo.
[to top of second column] |
The militants were met by Iraqi Kurdish fighters, known as
Peshmerga, and fighters from the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK).
After IS took the silo, Baba said, they installed snipers there. He
speculates that the militants believed U.S. warplanes would not
strike the facility, which is in the center of town.
“They want to get people on their side especially the Arabs. Maybe
that’s why they didn’t do anything to the wheat, not to anger
people,” he said.
IS held Makhmur for three days before the Kurdish fighters and U.S.
air strikes on IS positions – though not on the silo – drove them
out. U.S.-led air strikes did hit grain silos in the northern Syrian
town of Manbij on Sept 28. A group monitoring the war said the
aircraft may have mistaken the mills and grain silos for an Islamic
State base. There was no immediate comment from Washington. SMOOTH
TRANSITION
In many ways, IS is replicating in Iraq strategies it developed in
Syria. In the year it has controlled the town of Raqqa in
northeastern Syria, for instance, IS militants say they have allowed
former employees from Assad’s regime to continue to run its mills.
The group has set up a wheat "diwan," or bureau, in charge of the
supply chain, from harvesting the crop to distributing flour.
The same push to keep things running smoothly can be seen in Iraq.
IS fighters have regularly avoided destroying government
installations they have captured. When IS took over Iraq's largest
dam it kept employees in place and even brought in engineers from
Mosul to make repairs.
Baghdad, too, has tried to minimise upheaval.
Hassan Ibrahim, head of Iraq's Grain Board, the Trade Ministry body
responsible for procuring Iraq’s wheat internationally and from
local farmers, said that government employees in IS-held areas keep
in regular touch with head office. Some staff in IS areas even come
to Baghdad every couple of weeks, he said.
In the past few weeks, he said, IS fighters had disappeared from
some areas in Mosul and Kirkuk because of the U.S.-led air strikes.
“The situation is stable,” he said, with IS fighters mostly happy to
allow state employees to continue to run the silos.
“I give instructions to my people to try to be quiet and smooth with
those people because they are very violent people. It is not good to
be violent with violent people because they will come to kill you.
Our aim is to keep the wheat.”
After IS’s June offensive, Ibrahim was ordered to suspend salaries
for workers in IS areas. “But this troubled me," he said. "I cannot
have the mills stopping. I need people to stay there like guards to
convince the Islamic State that wheat is important for everybody.”
Ibrahim says he convinced his bosses to keep paying salaries. A
Trade Ministry spokesman confirmed that all government employees in
Mosul had been paid their salaries “through state banks in Kirkuk,
as it’s safer and under government control.”
Ibrahim is now worried about farmers who have not been paid for the
wheat they delivered in the weeks before the grain was seized by IS.
He said the Grain Board and the Trade Ministry were trying to pay
farmers either living in IS-held areas or recently displaced from
them. "We would like to help the farmers, but not IS," he said.
WINNING HEARTS AND STOMACHS
In some places, the IS stranglehold on wheat appears to be winning
support among Sunnis.
Ahsan Moheree, chairman of the government-affiliated Arab Farmers
Union in Hawija, says IS has gained in popularity since its fighters
took over. Baghdad’s dismissive attitude towards the country’s Sunni
Arabs had forced people towards IS, he said. But IS’s ability to
provide food had also helped.
“They distribute flour to the Arabs in the area. They get the wheat
from the Hawija silo ... And they run the mill and they distribute
to people in a very organised way,” he said.
Even those who have fled IS see wheat as one reason for the group’s
strength.
“Nowadays a kilo of wheat is 4,000 or 5,000 dinars ($3.45 - $4.30).
It used to be 10,000 to 11,000 dinars,” said Joumana Zewar, 54, a
farmer who now lives in Baharka camp outside Arbil. IS and Sunni
Arabs are selling the wheat they stole “for very cheap. It’s cheap
because they stole it.”
Zewar called a friend in Mosul to check on the latest prices.
“The price of foods and bread is very cheap,” the friend said.
Islamic State had taken control, and as in Syria, was dictating
prices. “They are the government here now. They are going to the
bakeries and saying, ‘Sell at this price.’”
THE YEAR AHEAD
The big worry now is next season’s crop. In Nineveh province, home
to the capital of the group’s self-declared caliphate, 750,000
hectares (1.8 million acres) should soon be sown with wheat and
835,000 hectares with barley, an Iraqi agriculture ministry official
said.
The official said that the province normally has 100,000 farmers.
But thousands have fled.
Iraqi farmers normally get next season’s seeds from their current
harvest, keeping back some of the wheat for that purpose. IS
controls enough wheat so finding seeds should not be a problem. It
also controls Ministry of Agriculture offices in Mosul and Tikrit
which should have fertilizer supplies.
But getting the seeds and fertilizer into the right hands will be a
problem. Mohamed Diab, director of the World Food Program's Regional
Bureau for the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and Eastern
Europe, said that it is "highly unlikely" that displaced farmers
would return.
"The picture is bleak regarding agriculture production next year,"
he said. "The place where displacement has happened is the main
granary of the country."
That’s especially true for non-Sunni Arab farmers. Those who have
remained on their land just outside IS-held territory fear the
militants will soon take their villages, and their harvested but
unsold crops.
Even if that does not happen, they say, they will not plant after
the first rain, which typically comes at the end of September or in
early October.
Farmers in the town of Shekhan, nestled among sun-bleached wheat
fields, say they have no hope of getting the seeds, fertilizer and
fuel needed to plant because the provincial government in Mosul is
under IS control.
"The real problem is how to get seeds to those inside Mosul and
surrounding areas,” said Nineveh Governor Atheel Nujaifi, who
believes production will drop next season.
Bashar Jamo, head of a local farmers' cooperative, is also worried.
“The most important thing to us is agriculture, not security. Maybe
(IS) will have a state, maybe an army, but all we need is to be able
to farm.”
(Additional reporting by Ned Parker and Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad,
Maha El Dahan in Abu Dhabi and Mariam Karouny in Beirut; Editing by
Michael Georgy and Simon Robinson)
[© 2014 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2014 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
