With officials crediting the increasingly desperate situation, which Anbar Province’s governor described as a “state of famine,” the ISIS-held city of Fallujah is facing growing unrest, with tribal factions clashing with the ISIS forces in the city’s north.
The al-Juraisi tribe’s leadership described the attack as a full scale uprising, and were calling for Western air support, though at this point the only confirmed damage done in the city was the destruction of a single checkpoint.
Police in the area said that the fighting actually started over a totally unrelated issue in which the ISIS religious police, the Hisbah, accused a woman from the Juraisi tribe of immodesty because she was out in public at a market and not wearing gloves.
Fallujah has been under the control of ISIS for around two years, and before that was in a state of virtual open-rebellion against the Iraqi government, related to the then-Maliki government’s crackdown on Sunni politicians. The city is now surrounded, since the fall of Ramadi, and basic goods are said to be in short supply.