By Hussein Zainulabdeen | Independent Researcher — Iraqi Minority Rights | husseinmonitor.com
When Iraqi forces declared Tal Afar fully liberated from ISIS on September 1, 2017, the celebrations were real. A city that had suffered three years of occupation — massacres, displacement, destruction — was finally free. The Iraqi flag flew again over the ancient Turkmen city in western Nineveh.
Five years later, the question is no longer whether Tal Afar was liberated. It is whether liberation meant anything at all for the people who lived there.
What ISIS Did to Tal Afar
Tal Afar fell to ISIS on June 16, 2014. The city's population — largely Shia and Sunni Turkmen, numbering around 200,000 to 225,000 — was shattered almost overnight. Most fled. Some Sunni Turkmen remained, and a number became implicated in ISIS's war crimes — a wound that still cuts through communal relations today.
The Shia Turkmen community bore particular brutality. Women and girls were abducted, with an estimated 450 held in sexual slavery — a crime that has received a fraction of the international attention directed at the Yazidi case, despite comparable atrocities. Mass executions were carried out. Homes were looted and destroyed. The historic city center, centuries old, was reduced to rubble in neighborhoods that will take generations to rebuild.
Liberation Without Return
After liberation, the UN Special Representative for Iraq welcomed the military victory and called for "accelerated stabilization efforts to enable the civilians who have fled the fighting to voluntarily and safely return to their homes."
The words were right. The implementation was not.
Tal Afar's population did not simply return after 2017. Reconstruction was slow, underfunded, and politically complicated. Up to 80,000 Sunni Turkmen had fled into exile — many to Turkey — and their return was entangled in fears about security, accountability, and the presence of Shia-dominated Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) in the area.
Research commissioned by the United States Institute of Peace found that both Sunni and Shia Turkmen agreed on one thing: lasting security required a balance of power between the two communities, with Sunnis included in the security sector. The return of Shia militias after liberation, interviewees warned, would undermine reconciliation prospects rather than support them.
That warning was largely ignored.
The Compensation Gap
Iraq has laws — Law 20 (2009), Law 57 (2015), and the Yazidi Survivors Law of 2021 — that theoretically provide for compensation to conflict victims. In Tal Afar, 37% of district residents had applied for compensation. Only 1% reported actually receiving it.
That gap between application and delivery is not a bureaucratic accident. It reflects a political system that acknowledges victims in law while failing them in practice. Compensation is not just financial relief — it is a symbol of government recognition that a crime occurred and that the state bears responsibility for redress. When 99% of applicants receive nothing, that symbol communicates the opposite.
The Sunni-Shia Fault Line
Perhaps the most delicate and least discussed dimension of Tal Afar's post-liberation reality is the communal fracture within the Turkmen community itself.
The fall of Tal Afar to ISIS severely damaged already strained Sunni-Shia Turkmen relations. Some Sunni Turkmen joined ISIS and stand accused of committing war crimes against their Shia neighbors. The liberation was carried out partly by Shia-dominated PMF forces. Both facts have left deep scars.
Reconciliation efforts have taken place — notably negotiations that included women representatives who pushed back against attempts to exclude their voices. These efforts have produced agreements. But agreements on paper have not translated into security on the ground or justice for victims.
As of 2022, the communal divisions that ISIS exploited remain. And in the absence of genuine accountability — for ISIS perpetrators and for any abuses committed during liberation — they are unlikely to heal on their own.
The Missing 450
No account of Tal Afar's post-liberation reality can ignore the women who have not come back.
An estimated 450 Shia Turkmen women were kidnapped by ISIS from Tal Afar and surrounding areas. More than 400 remain missing. Unlike the Yazidi case — where international attention, organized advocacy, and the Yazidi Survivors Law have created at least a partial institutional response — the Turkmen abductees remain largely invisible in international discourse.
There is no official count of how many Shia Turkmen women were kidnapped. There is no equivalent of the Yazidi Survivors Law for Turkmen victims. There are families in Tal Afar who have spent eight years not knowing whether their daughters, sisters, and mothers are alive — and with no institution actively searching for them.
Liberation did not bring these women home. And the world has largely moved on.
Conclusion
Tal Afar's liberation from ISIS was necessary and real. But liberation is not reconstruction. It is not justice. It is not the return of the missing. It is not reconciliation between communities that were turned against each other by three years of systematic brutality.
Five years after the Iraqi flag was raised over the city center, Tal Afar is a place where the flags are visible but the future is not. Where compensation laws exist but payments do not reach. Where communal wounds are acknowledged but not healed. Where women are still missing and no one is looking.
A liberated city deserves more than a victory declaration. It deserves the sustained attention, resources, and accountability that make liberation mean something to the people who lived through what came before it.
Independent Research & Analysis
Hussein Monitor
Hussein Monitor publishes in-depth field research on Iraqi minority rights, post-ISIS accountability, and the human cost of impunity. By Hussein Zainulabdeen — former UNAMI Liaison Officer and independent researcher.
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