Airstrikes by the Iraqi army on Saturday killed nine “terroristsinvolved in an attack by the Islamic State (IS) group that claimed the lives of eleven soldiers in Diyala province a week ago, security forces assured.
Read alsoKenya: reinforced security after terrorist alerts
The January 21 night attack, claimed by IS on its Telegram channels, targeted an Iraqi army base in the Hawi Alarm region in eastern Iraq. Eleven soldiers, including a lieutenant, were killed.
Referring to this attack that they had pledged to “revenge“, the security forces said in a statement on Saturday evening that they had “pinpointed the exact location in Hawi alarm where the terrorist group that carried out this criminal act was located“. “Three precise strikes by Iraqi F-16s have killed nine terrorist elements so far“, adds the press release, specifying that”the mission is still in progress“.
After a meteoric rise in power in 2014 in Iraq and neighboring Syria and the conquest of vast territories, IS has seen its “caliphateself-proclaimed waver under the blow of successive offensives in these two countries.
But if Iraq has proclaimed its “Victoireagainst ISIS at the end of 2017, jihadists remain a threat and continue to carry out occasional attacks against villagers and security forces in the north of the country, particularly in the Kirkuk region and in the provinces of Salaheddine and Diyala.
The jihadist organizationmaintains a largely clandestine presence in Iraq and Syria and leads a sustained insurgency on both sides of the border between the two countriesaccording to a UN report published last year. In these two countries, the jihadist organization retains “in all 10,000 active fightersaccording to this report.