ARBIL, Iraq (Reuters) — As the season for wheat planting in Iraq wound down late last year, farmers in areas under the control of the Sunni militant group Islamic State grew worried.
More than two dozen farmers said they had not planted the normal amount of seed, either because they could not access their land, did not have the proper fertilizers or adequate fuel or had no guarantees that Islamic State would buy their crop as Baghdad normally does.
Farmers and Iraqi and United Nations’ officials now fear a drastically reduced crop this spring that could leave hundreds of thousands of Iraqis hungry.
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However, another big loser would be Islamic State, which controls territory that normally produces as much as 40 percent of Iraq’s wheat crop.
The breakaway al Qaeda group, which declared an Islamic caliphate across parts of Syria and Iraq last summer, has killed thousands and forced hundreds of thousands from their homes.
Islamic State militants had hoped to use wheat to show it can govern better than the Arab governments it condemns as infidels.
They have published pamphlets with photos of golden fields and fighters distributing food.
A bad crop might not cost the group control of territory, but it would seriously dent its campaign to be seen as an alternative government and hurt its credibility among fellow Sunnis.
Iraqi farmers have long complained of Baghdad’s neglect and mismanagement of agriculture. International sanctions and the U.S. invasion further hurt the sector.
However, many farmers say this planting season marks an all-time low.
Across the border in Syria, where Islamic State has controlled the city of Raqqa since May 2013, wheat production last year was down almost 70 percent from the level before the civil war, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
Syrian farmers in Islamic State-held territory say production was hit by the conflict, poor rainfall and fuel shortages. Several said that Islamic State did not help farmers plant and did not buy their harvest as the Syrian government used to do.
Instead, farmers say they were forced to look for new buyers and often fell prey to avaricious middlemen.
UN and Iraqi government officials don’t have access to much of Iraq so cannot provide an accurate forecast of the country’s 2015 wheat crop.
Farmers will begin harvesting in April, and production will also be determined by access to their fields and the weather, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture said has been favourable.
Farming in huge swaths of the rural belt around Baghdad has also shut down because of violence or because farmers fear the Shiite militias, which now control the area and are fighting Islamic State.
However, the greatest concern is in northern Iraq. Interviews with farmers who remain on their land or have left for Kurdistan suggest that few in Islamic State-controlled parts of the country’s breadbasket region were able to plant as normal.
Recent satellite imagery from NASA and the USDA reinforces that. The imagery, publicly available through the Global Agriculture Monitoring Project at the University of Maryland, shows that crops in Islamic State-controlled parts of Nineveh and Salahadeen provinces appear far less healthy than in Kurdish-held territory.
Sunni farmer Abu Amr laments how tough it has become. He once hated Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, who lost power following elections in April, but his view began to change when he was not paid for last season’s harvest. Instead, Islamic State militants stole it from a government silo they had seized.
“When we saw the chaos of (ISIS), we wanted Maliki back. Everything is gone: my livestock, my harvest, everything,” he said.
Amr, who has moved to Kirkuk, said neighbours have told him by phone that they have planted one-third of his 60 acres using seeds stored in his house.
He sent some cash to buy fertilizer, but not enough.
“We used to blame Maliki for everything. Now we cry and hope for the return of those days,” he said.
“Before, there was some kind of security, some kind of state. It is incomparable to the current situation.”
Farther north, Yazidi farmer Salim Saleem abandoned his fields and olive tree groves when Islamic State fighters overran the fertile Nineveh Valley. Now he lives with his family in a rented house in Dohuk, in the relative safety of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region.
He said air strikes and Peshmerga forces have not dislodged Islamic State from his hometown of Bashiqa. Instead, they have turned the farmland into a battlefield.
Several weeks ago, Saleem scaled the Peshmerga-held Zartek Mountain near Bashiqa to inspect Yazidi-owned land.
“I saw with my own eyes that the land was bare,” he said.
There are constant reminders in areas recently retaken by Peshmerga forces of the dangers that have kept many farmers from planting.
In the Makhmur district southeast of Mosul, a group of Kurdish farmers gathered one mid-December afternoon after heavy rain.
In a normal planting season, rain would be a blessing, but most of the men were from areas too close to the frontline to risk returning to their fields.
As they talked, a loud explosion sounded in the distance. The farmers looked up, assuming the noise had been an air strike. Then one received a phone call saying a landmine had exploded.
Kurdish farmer Mushir Othman Hassan said two tractor drivers in the area had recently driven over landmines. One died and the other lost both his legs and an eye.
Hassan said some of his Arab neighbours in his Islamic State-held village of Surnaj el Kobra, about 15 kilometres away, were planting, but they were also hurt by the fighting.
“They are just planting a subsistence amount for themselves. Daish has not intervened with them,” he said, using the derogatory Arabic term for Islamic State.
He said his neighbours had told him by phone that fighters “visited them” while they were planting, but that Islamic State “doesn’t have a big presence because of air strikes.”
Islamic State’s attempts to help farmers seem to have backfired.
Several farmers reached by phone in areas controlled by the group said they had rejected subsidized seeds offered to them by the militants.
“We don’t want any help from them,” said Saidullah Fathi, a farmer from Surnaj al-Kobra southeast of Mosul.
Others said the seeds came from wheat stolen by the militants, which they called “haram,” or forbidden.
Iraqi farmers have long complained of Baghdad’s neglect and mismanagement, but one Sunni wheat farmer, speaking through a crackling phone line from Sharqat, said life under the militants and government rule was like “the difference between night and day.”
He receives only a few hours of electricity a day and needs to buy fertilizer on the black market at exorbitant prices.
Many farmers feel caught in a conflict that could last for years.
“We can’t go back home and feel secure on the land. I can’t convince my relatives to come back,” said farmer Sherzaid Sadradein, a Kurd now living in a house in Arbil.
“In our village, only one person (of 19 farmers) is planting, just as a shot in the dark. In the past, during the worst days under (former Iraqi leader) Saddam (Hussein), we were only able to plant 10 percent. Now that 10 percent has been reduced to one percent.”
