Hussein Zainulabdeen

Taza Khurmatu 2016: The ISIS Chemical Attack That the World Chose to Ignore On March 8, 2016, ISIS launched a chemical weapons attack on Taza Khurmatu — a Shia Turkmen town south of Kirkuk. Hundreds were injured. Children were hospitalized with chemical burns. The attack was documented, verified, and reported. Then the world moved on. Nine years later, no one has been held accountable. What Happened in Taza Khurmatu Taza Khurmatu, a predominantly Shia Turkmen town located approximately 20 kilometers south of Kirkuk, had been on the frontlines of the fight against ISIS since 2014. The town had survived multiple conventional attacks. But on March 8, 2016, ISIS used something different: chemical weapons. ISIS fired rockets filled with sulfur mustard — a blister agent banned under international law since the 1925 Geneva Protocol — into residential areas of Taza Khurmatu. The attack injured hundreds of civilians, including children and the elderly. Victims reported severe bl...

AUGUST 28, 2024 · HUSSEIN MONITOR Bir Alou Antar: What Iraq's Newest Mass Grave Site Is Telling Us — and What It Cannot Yet Say Between May and August 2024, UNITAD and Iraqi forensic teams excavated a natural sinkhole near Tal Afar known as Bir Alou Antar. It is one of the final excavations UNITAD will conduct before its mandate ends next month. What the site has revealed — and what it has left unanswered — tells us as much about the limits of justice as about the crimes themselves. What Is Bir Alou Antar? Bir Alou Antar — the name translates roughly as "the well of Antar" — is a natural limestone sinkhole located in the agricultural terrain surrounding Tal Afar in northwestern Iraq's Nineveh Governorate. Sinkholes of this kind are common geological features in the region, formed over centuries by the dissolution of limestone bedrock. When ISIS occupied Tal Afar and the surrounding areas in June 2014, these sinkholes became something else: dispos...

Tal Afar After Liberation: A City Without a Future? 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...