Special Report - Wheat warfare: Islamic State uses grain to tighten grip in
Iraq
Tue Sep 30, 2014 11:55am GMT
By Maggie Fick
SHEKHAN Iraq (Reuters) - For Salah Paulis, it came down to a choice between
his faith and his crop.
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 (309 pound) ."
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 neighbouring 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 neighbouring 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 neighbour 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 programme. 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 Organisation. 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.
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
centre 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 fertiliser
supplies.
But getting the seeds and fertiliser into the right hands will be a
problem. Mohamed Diab, director of the World Food Programme'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, fertiliser 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)