Iraq in grip of ISIS violence as 17 die over two days

Iraq was gripped by a rare spike in ISIS violence on Tuesday after eight people were killed in Anbar province in the west of the country.

On Monday, nine Iraqi policemen were killed in a bombing in Kirkuk governorate in another attack claimed by the group.

In the Anbar attack, villagers tried to confront a group of ISIS fighters on motorbikes in a village north-west of Fallujah, but were quickly overpowered, the Iraqi News Agency reported.

Uday Al Khadran, an official in the town of Al Khalis where the attack took place, said “dozens” of residents had confronted the group, some of them without weapons. He said a security operation was continuing to capture the terrorists.

While ISIS violence across Iraq has reached a historic low — declining since it lost control of Mosul in 2017 — attacks in Anbar have focused on people the group accuses of helping the government.

Anbar is an overwhelmingly Sunni province and many of the province’s tribes are heavily armed, working with security forces to stamp out ISIS remnants.

Analysts say survivors of the group are hiding in remote villages, moving through wadis and rough desert terrain to conduct opportunistic attacks.

The presence of Iran-backed militias across Anbar has also raised tensions. But public sentiment against ISIS — which brutally occupied and attacked the province’s main cities of Fallujah and Ramadi between 2014 and 2017 — remains strong.

On Wednesday, three Iraqi soldiers were killed when a bomb exploded during a security operation in the Tarmiyah district, north of Baghdad. Among the dead was the commander of the 59th Infantry Brigade.

No one claimed responsibility for the deaths, but ISIS remnants are active in the area and have previously claimed similar attacks.

Source: msn