Shiite militias are crashing the Mosul offensive

All that changed when the Shiite militias fighting under the umbrella of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) opened a new front in the desert to close the gap. They have already reached the outskirts of Tal Afar, a Turkmen-majority city 35 miles west of Mosul.

Shiite PMF units were explicitly excluded from the liberation of Mosul itself in an effort to reassure the city’s predominately Sunni population. But Shiite militias’ side mission in Tal Afar should hardly be a surprise. The city is closely associated with the rise of the Islamic State and its forerunner, al Qaeda in Iraq, and has become infamous as a nest of Sunni terrorists. In 2014, the city’s Shiite residents were expelled during the Islamic State takeover of northern Iraq.

Shiite fighters want to take Tal Afar back — and, some suspect, to exact revenge. In April, Hadi al-Amiri, the head of the Iranian-backed Badr Organization, began staking out the movement’s claim to dispense justice on the city. At the time, he told one of us: “Only the Popular Mobilization Forces can go to Tal Afar.”