[Rudaw] Months of heavy rain have turned the normally arid plains of Qarachogh a verdant green. In this hotly disputed territory of northern Iraq, the increasingly brazen presence of bearded button men in the hills suggests the bad boy threat once thought defeated is also growing back anew.An hour and a half’s drive southwest of Erbil is the last Peshmerga checkpoint before travelers enter a vast no man’s land ‐ one of several disputed areas that opened up between Kurdish and federal government lines when the two sides clashed in October 2017.
These ungoverned spaces, awash with rival armies and militias competing for supremacy, have left fertile ground for Iraq’s next insurgency to thrive and the resurgence of the Islamic State