The attack came after sunset in the quiet Iraqi village of Albu Bali when Islamic State group gunmen drove into town and unleashed fire with automatic rifles.
“I heard the shots, I went out and I saw my nephew lying on the ground,” recalled Ali Menwar about the deadly violence that shattered the local calm on December 19.
The group of Sunni Muslim extremists “arrived at about 8:15 pm and started firing randomly”, said another local from the mainly Shiite village, Abbas Mazhar Hussein, 34.
As Menwar rushed inside, bullets smashed into the wall around him and two grazed his neck, which now bears angry red scars, before he could slam the gate shut behind him.
Others were less lucky in the village of 5,000 people, about 70 kilometres (40 miles) north of the capital Baghdad.
“My son, my grandson and my cousins fell as martyrs,” said Menwar’s neighbour Jabbar Alwan, his eyes welling up with tears.
“It’s very painful,” said the elderly man, who lost four relatives. “We didn’t expect this.”
When it was all over, eight people lay dead and another six were wounded in Albu Bali.
None of the attackers have been caught.
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– Fear of reprisals –
Iraq has come a long way since major fighting ended over five years ago against IS, putting an end to their self-declared “caliphate” which once stretched across swathes of Iraq and Syria.
After a gruelling urban battle in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, forces backed by a US-led coalition declared victory over IS in the country in late 2017.
But periodic attacks still claim lives among Iraq’s war-weary citizens who have endured decades of conflict which flared especially after a 2003 US-led invasion toppled dictator Saddam Hussein.
An IS ambush last December 18 killed nine federal policemen in Kirkuk, 100 kilometres north of Baghdad — but all too often it is civilians who fall victim.
The residents of Albu Bali, like the majority of Iraqis, are predominantly Shiites, a branch of Islam that the Sunni extremists of IS consider apostates and label “rawafid” or “rejectors”.
Claiming the bloody attack on the Telegram messaging service, IS did not refer to civilians but claimed it had targeted “rawafid militiamen”, a term used to describe members of the Shiite-led former paramilitary group Hashed al-Shaabi.
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Sheikh Khalis Rashid, the local chief, said Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani had called him after the attack and “begged me to prevent any” violent reprisal.
Such reprisals would likely have taken the form of attacks on nearby Sunni-majority villages sometimes accused of providing a safe haven to the jihadists, the local chief said.