Hawija, a town in Iraq's Kirkuk province, was liberated from ISIS in 2017. Yet the people living here claim that the liberation was a sham. One man, who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of recrimination from ISIS, claims that the people of Hawija "are under their [ISIS] control.” ISIS is in revival at the nexus of four provinces in Iraq: Kirkuk, Salahuddin, Divala and Sulaimania. Dire Ghazi, who works for the Kurdish counter-terrorism unit, believes that the group survives because of "the security vacuum between us, the government of Iraqi Kurdistan, and the government of Iraq.” Ghazi claims that in Sulaimania Province, the Iraqis and Kurds haven’t carried out a single joint operation. "If the Iraqi government does an operation today, they only inform us. They don’t invite us to work together.”