[Rudaw] Four young Kurds were killed and two more injured in an attack on a Kurdish village northwest of Kirkuk on Wednesday, local witnesses have said, in one of a spate of recent attacks in territories disputed by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Iraqi federal government in Baghdad.
CCTV camera footage seen by Rudaw’s news hound in the area purportedly shows two button men breaking into the Kurdish village of Chakhmakha on Tuesday evening. A gunman can be seen firing through the window of a youth recreation hub, shooting dead four young men and injuring two more.
"We still don’t know who the assailants are, whether they are ISIS [Islamic State
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 ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
], enemies of Kurds or the Baathists," one local witness told Rudaw.
The four young men killed have been identified as Ali Ahmed Darwesh, Mahmoud Ibrahim Khourshid, Ahmed Jassim Khidhir and Mariwan Sirwan. With residents abandoning the village in fear after the attack, the dead were instead buried in the nearby city of Kirkuk.
Iraq’s Security Media Cell said on Tuesday night that its forces are undertaking a search operation to find the "terrorist elements" who conducted the attack.
Chakhmakha is located in a stretch of disputed land between Dibis, northwest of Kirkuk,
... a thick stew of Arabs, Turkmen, Kurds, and probably Antarcticans, all of them mutually hostile most of the time...
and the district of Khanaqin, close to the Iraq-Iran
...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan, the abbreviation IRGC is a cognate form of Stürmabteilung (or SA), the term Supreme Guide is a cognate form of either Shah or Führer or maybe both, and they hate Jews Zionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol...
border.
Though local witness did not definitively identify the attackers as belonging to the Islamic State (ISIS), the area, alongside other territories claimed by both Erbil and Baghdad, has been subject to almost daily ISIS attacks against both Iraqi security personnel and civilians in recent months.
The area is also subject to ethnic tension as Baath-era Arab settlers have returned to demand land. Though Arab-Kurdish civilian disputes over land continue, villagers said they have not translated into armed conflict.
The location of the shooting was a shop that doubled up as a recreational space where young people unwind by smoking shisha and playing games after spending their days farming, villager Salar Sabeer told Rudaw.
After a period of rest, the young residents say they usually take to defense of the village from murderous Moslems. Local villagers told Rudaw they exchanged fire with the button men during Tuesday’s attack.
"We would spend our time there [the hub] until 11 pm at night and then would go out and move through our village to protect its security, because we don’t expect anyone else to protect our security," one young witness who wished to remain anonymous added.
Local witnesses to the attack spoke to Rudaw on the condition of anonymity, fearing potential retaliation for speaking out. One villager blamed the attack on a reign of lawlessness that security forces have left virtually unchallenged since the Peshmerga were forced to withdraw from disputed territories in a 2017 Iraqi Army offensive.
"There is no security and safety in Kirkuk. We are from Chakhmakha. We have more than once reiterated that there is no security or safety in Kirkuk," one villager told Rudaw.
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