Shafaq News..Jurf al-Sakhr and Iraq's push to disarm factions

Shafaq News

Jurf al-Sakhr, a largely depopulated
farming district in northern Babil province, has returned to the center of
Iraqi politics as Baghdad presses armed groups to place their weapons under
state control before a September 30 deadline. More than a decade after it was
retaken from ISIS and renamed Jurf al-Nasr, the district’s residents are still
displaced, and parts of the district remain under the control of factions
within the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), the state-linked, mostly Shia
network of armed groups formed to fight ISIS in 2014.

The dispute now runs on two tracks
at once. One is humanitarian: thousands of families who fled a decade ago have
never been allowed home. The other is strategic: the same closed zone has been
named in successive official reports as a base for armed factions and a target
of foreign airstrikes.

A Strategic Pocket South Of Baghdad

Jurf al-Sakhr sits roughly 60
kilometers southwest of Baghdad and about 13 kilometers north of the town of
al-Musayyib. Its orchards, irrigation drains, and waterlogged flats are hard to
police, and it straddles routes linking the capital to central and southern
Iraq, including the Shia holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, and to Al-Anbar
province in the west.

That geography made the area a
security problem long before ISIS. After the 2003 US-led invasion, the district
fell inside what Iraqi forces called the Triangle of Death, the farming belt
directly south of Baghdad, taking in Mahmoudiyah, Latifiyah, and Yusufiyah and
reaching Iskandariya and Jurf al-Sakhr, where al-Qaeda and other armed groups
exploited the terrain during the sectarian war. The same name is now also used
for a separate northern zone across Diyala, Kirkuk, and Saladin provinces.

When ISIS swept through in 2014,
Jurf al-Sakhr became one of its footholds in northern Babil, and displacement
began even before the fight to retake it; the Iraqi Red Crescent Society
reported in May 2014 that roughly 900 families had already fled areas tied to
the district.

From Battlefield To Sealed Zone

The turning point came that autumn.
An operation known as the Ashura offensive began on October 23, 2014, drawing
Iraqi forces and PMF factions, and the district was retaken within days. Iraqi
authorities argued at the time that leaving ISIS in place there would have
threatened the approaches to Karbala, Najaf, and Babil.

Recapture did not reopen it. The
forces and factions that fought there stayed, and Jurf al-Sakhr hardened into a
closed military zone where the armed factions maintained a dominant security
presence. Several groups controlled it in the early years, among them Kataib
Hezbollah, one of the most powerful Iran-aligned factions inside the PMF.

Hassan Fad’am, a former member of
parliament for Babil and a leader in the al-Hikma movement of Ammar al-Hakim, a
Shia political bloc that maintains no armed factions, says more than 70 percent
of residents left during ISIS rule rather than after liberation, and that
troops who entered afterward found the district “fully mined and
booby-trapped.” Clearing it, he argues, would require extensive technical
work and government resources, and the case should not become a sectarian or
political weapon. Residents and opponents of the factions counter that a
closure now approaching twelve years exceeded any demining rationale and became
a permanent military and political fact.

Twelve Years Of Displacement

Government figures over the past two
years show the displacement crisis remains, though the numbers shift with each
registration cycle. Iraq’s Ministry of Migration and Displacement said in May
2024 that about 6,000 displaced families from Jurf al-Sakhr had yet to return.

For those still out, the loss
extends beyond housing. Political researcher Abdul Qader al-Nayel says some
residents have spent close to a decade in displacement camps, pointing to the
Bzeibez camp in Al-Anbar province, which he estimates now holds between 1,360
and 1,400 families. Most were farmers, he notes, and many now depend on aid
after losing their land and orchards, with years of displacement taking a
growing toll on families and children’s access to basic services.

A Wider Map Of Areas Outside State
Control

Security sources describe Jurf
al-Sakhr as one of several areas where the state’s authority remains limited.
One source told Shafaq News that close to 20 armed groups and factions hold
territory where the army and police are kept out, and security cordons are
imposed by the factions themselves. Another source pointed to weapons workshops
and depots inside several of them, said to hold drones and Iranian medium- and
long-range missiles, along with unofficial prisons and detention sites.

In Iraqi commentary, these places
are often called the depopulated, or “dark,” cities. Their combined
pre-displacement population, according to figures provided by the security
source, is put at around 1.25 million people, almost all Sunni, now spread
across 13 camps in Al-Anbar, the outskirts of Baghdad, Saladin, and Nineveh,
and across Erbil, Al-Sulaymaniyah, and Duhok in the Kurdistan Region. Together,
the zones cover more than 3,000 square kilometers. Besides Jurf al-Sakhr, they
include parts of al-Musayyib and the area east of Latifiyah in northern Babil;
al-Awja, and the outskirts of Tikrit in Saladin; and stretches of Al-Anbar and
Nineveh that run to the Syrian border.

Senior Sunni politicians have
described Jurf al-Sakhr in blunt terms. Muhammad al-Halbousi, head of Taqadum,
the largest Sunni party, called it a camp for the armed factions that “no one
is able to enter.”

A Site Linked To Weapons And Strikes

What sets Jurf al-Sakhr apart from
other cases of post-ISIS displacement is the military activity reported inside
it. In 2018, Reuters reported, citing Iranian officials and Iraqi and Western
intelligence sources, that Iran had moved short-range ballistic missiles to
Iraq and named the district among sites said to be used for storage. Later
reports pointed to workshops said to be developing missiles and drones, claims
that have deepened the secrecy around the area without independent
confirmation.

The district has also been struck
repeatedly. Sites inside it were hit in a US strike in January 2024, and again
on July 30, 2024, when the PMF Commission said four of its members were killed
in three strikes on one of its positions; Washington described that strike as
defensive, launched after it detected preparations for an attack on US forces.
Two further rounds of airstrikes hit PMF sites in the district on February 28
and March 31, 2026; reports attributed those to the United States and Israel,
though neither formally claimed responsibility.

A Symbol In Iraq’s Sectarian
Politics

Over the years, the district has
become shorthand for Iraq’s wider Sunni-Shia and state-versus-faction disputes.
In 2017, the Babil provincial council voted to pursue political actors who
demanded the return of the displaced, while Sunni politicians kept pressing for
it. In April 2023, the head of the Sunni-led Sovereignty Alliance (Al-Siyada),
Khamis al-Khanjar, declared, “We will pray in Jurf soon,” a reference
to the residents’ return that drew a sharp rejection from faction leaders, who
warned against readmitting people they accuse of ISIS ties.

That accusation is what makes the
issue so combustible, since almost any statement about Jurf al-Sakhr can be
read along sectarian lines. Fad’am warns against turning it into a sectarian,
political, or media issue, arguing that such framing has itself blocked
returns.

“Years in the camps have bred a deep
sense of grievance and weakened residents’ trust in the state, making
reconciliation harder the longer it lasts,” Al-Nayel adds.

The Government’s Next Move

The latest return to prominence is
tied directly to Baghdad’s push for a state monopoly on weapons. The government
of Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, who took office in May 2026 backed by the State
Administration Coalition, a grouping of Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish parties, and
with US support, has set September 30 as the deadline for armed groups to bring
their weapons under state control, a date that also marks the scheduled end of
the US-led coalition’s mission in Iraq. Government spokesman Haidar al-Aboudi
has said any weapons outside state institutions after that date will be treated
under the law, including counter-terrorism law. Kataib Hezbollah is among the
factions that have tied the future of their weapons to the withdrawal of
foreign forces.

Against that backdrop, a government
committee grouping the interior, justice, and agriculture ministries with the
PMF Commission has begun fieldwork in Jurf al-Sakhr, where Kataib Hezbollah
controls security in parts of the area. The broader plan relies on restricting
access to sensitive sites rather than conducting direct raids, in an effort to
avoid armed confrontation.

The competing readings persist.
Babil provincial council member Mohammed al-Mansouri frames the question not as
a choice between reopening the district and keeping it closed, but as a duty to
return residents while safeguarding the province, noting that Babil has
previously been attacked from areas near the district.

Security expert Sarmad al-Bayati
argues the issue has been left unresolved so long that it has taken “on the
quality of a myth, thickened by years of political and media claims,” and says
any settlement must begin by bringing the federal government, the security
services, the factions, and the residents to one table to fix the area’s legal
and security status before mapping a route home.

For now, any path toward resolving
Jurf al-Sakhr runs through the committee’s work and the Sept. 30 deadline,
after which al-Aboudi says weapons held outside state control will be subject
to legal action.

Written and edited by Shafaq News
staff.

Shafaq News..Jurf al-Sakhr and Iraq’s push to disarm factions

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