Five suspected ISIS militants killed in Kirkuk announces military

The Iraqi forces in Kirkuk on Sunday announced that they had killed five suspected militants of the so-called Islamic State in an operation, according to a press release.

Wearing “explosive belts”, three members of the group were killed in the Turkalan area in southwestern Kirkuk by the Iraqi Army’s Eighth Division soldiers, a statement from the Security Media Cell read.

Overall, the forces had killed five “terrorists” in the area, according to the press release.

As a result of the operation, an Iraqi soldier was killed and another one was wounded, per the release.

Three weapons belonging to the suspected members were confiscated, it added.

The operation comes as the Iraqi fighter jets on Saturday targeted a remote area in the province, where they killed a number of suspected ISIS militants.

The Iraqi forces have ramped up their anti-ISIS operations in recent days following the terror group’s ambush on an Iraqi army outpost in early June that had killed at least two soldiers and wounded three others.

Saturday’s airstrikes against the group came in retaliation for the June 11 bloody attack on the army, according to a statement from the military.

However, the group was territorially announced defeated in 2017 by the then-Iraqi government, it is still capable of launching low-level attacks against security forces and civilians, particularly in the remote areas of the north and west.

The group once controlled a third of the country following its rapid rise in 2014, leading to the displacement of over a million and thousands of causalities among the security forces and civilian population.

The lack of security cooperation between the Kurdistan Region forces and the Iraqi army in the disputed territories is blamed for the ongoing threats from the group.

Despite repeated calls by the Kurdish region’s security and political leaders to speed up the formation of joint brigades in order to be deployed in those areas that have become an ISIS hotbed, no concrete actions had been taken so far, Kurdish officials have said on several occasions.

Source » kurdistan24