Hashd al-Shaabi militants repulse ISIS attack near the Syrian border

Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), known as Hashd al-Shaabi, on Sunday repelled a major attack by the ISIS terrorist group, preventing it from infiltrating into the Arab country from neighboring Syria.

In a statement on Sunday, the missile command of Hashd al-Shaabi based in the western province of Anbar said it had thwarted the terrorists’ attempt to enter Iraq from Syria by launching a missile attack.

The Iraqi popular forces successfully hit the terrorists on Syrian soil in the attack, the statement read, according to Iraqi sources.

The PMU also managed to target and hit another group of ISIS terrorists that indented to enter Iraq from Syria, the statement said.

ISIS militants made swift advances in much of northern and western Iraq over the summer of 2014, after capturing large swaths of northern Syria.

However, a combination of concentrated attacks by the Iraqi military and the volunteer forces, who rushed to take arms after top Iraqi cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a fatwa calling for fight against the militants, blunted the edge of ISIS offensive and later forced them to withdraw from the territories they had occupied.

In November 2017, the self-proclaimed caliphate of ISIS collapsed after Syrian and Iraqi armed forces and their allies managed to recapture the terror group’s last strongholds in the two Arab countries.

Source: Abna24