The battles that erupted when gunmen from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and other groups occupied Mosul on June 10 are now approaching sensitive areas for the Shiite community, shifting the patterns and implications of the conflict. 

After the gunmen took Mosul, they headed south toward Tikrit and the provinces of Salahuddin and Kirkuk, bypassing the city of Tal Afar, which lies northwest of Mosul and is predominantly inhabited by Shiite Turkmens. But on June 16, they attacked Tal Afar without being able to gain control of it.

Tal Afar is a very dangerous contact point, which carries nationalist and sectarian dimensions for the Turkmens and Shiites respectively. For this reason, a large government force is still holed up there.

Iraqi government forces, which have experienced a series of collapses since the start of the fighting, left another contact point, the town of Tuz Khurmato. The town is demographically and religiously similar to Tal Afar but in favor of Iraqi Kurdistan's peshmerga forces, with gunmen present at the city’s outskirts.