“No matter where you turn when covering ISIL’s two years of terror in Iraq and Syria, one name repeatedly crops up: Tal Afar. The town, with an estimated 200,000 residents when ISIL (a.k.a. the Islamic State), captured it two years ago, is perched on the dusty plains of northern Iraq, just shy of the Syrian border. Its native sons are thought to have taken a lead role in massacring Yazidis in nearby Sinjar during the summer of 2014. When ISIL seized the Mosul Dam for 12 days that August, a water engineer who’d previously managed Tal Afar’s drainage system was put in charge of it.”
Source: The perfect recipe for making jihadis was developed in this small Iraqi town — Quartz
