U.S. and Iraqi Commandos Targeted ISIS in Sprawling Operation
American and Iraqi commandos raided several Islamic State hide-outs in western Iraq last week, killing at least 14 ISIS fighters in one of the most sweeping counterterrorism missions in the country in recent years.
Seven U.S. soldiers were injured as more than 200 troops from both countries, including backup forces, hunted down fighters in bunkers over miles of remote terrain, U.S. and Iraqi officials said, adding that the size, scope and focus of the mission underscored the terrorist organization’s resurgence in recent months.
A senior insurgent commander overseeing Islamic State operations in the Middle East and Europe was the main target, they said.
“The operation targeted ISIS leaders with the objective of disrupting and degrading ISIS’s ability to plan, organize, and conduct attacks against Iraqi civilians, as well as U.S., allies and partners throughout the region and beyond,” the military’s Central Command said in a statement on Sunday.
American officials declined to identify the ISIS leaders targeted, including the senior militant, pending DNA analysis of the bodies.
The joint operation in Anbar province came even as Iraq’s prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, and Iraqi military commanders say they can keep the ISIS threat under control without U.S.-led assistance. Iraq and the United States are negotiating an agreement that would wind down the mission of the U.S.-led military coalition in Iraq. There are about 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq and 900 in neighboring Syria.
Central Command, however, announced in July that the number of attacks claimed by ISIS in Iraq and Syria was on track to double this year, compared with the year before. ISIS asserted responsibility for 153 attacks in the two countries in the first six months of 2024, the command said, but the military has repeatedly refused to provide a country-by-country breakdown of the attack figures.
“Iraq has managed to successfully contain the ISIS challenge in recent years, with the group’s operational tempo at an all-time low — but ISIS’s significant recovery next-door in Syria is cause for serious concern,” said Charles Lister, the director of the Middle East Institute’s Syria and counterterrorism programs.
“Thus, it’s these longtime ISIS safe havens, deep in Anbar’s desert, that will need consistently routing, if we’re to avoid an eventual ISIS spillover from Syria to Iraq,” Mr. Lister said.
The United States and other allied forces have helped Iraqi forces carry out more than 250 counterterrorism missions since last October, according to a senior U.S. military official.
But this raid was unusual in the heavy presence of American commandos leading the initial raid. More than 100 U.S. Special Operations Forces and other troops joined a smaller number of Iraqi soldiers in the main helicopter-borne assault, which took place early Thursday morning, American officials said.
Iraqi officials said in a statement that the operation began east of a riverbed that runs through the Anbar desert, in an area southwest of Falluja that they identified as Al Hazimi.
Fierce fighting ensued, in which Iraq said 14 ISIS fighters were killed; the United States put the death toll at 15 insurgents. ISIS fighters were armed with “numerous weapons, grenades and explosive ‘suicide belts,’ ” Central Command said in a statement late Friday. There was no indication of civilian casualties, the command said.
With American surveillance drones keeping watch overhead, more than 100 Iraqi forces followed up with a raid the next day, capturing two more ISIS militants who had fled the scene the night before with ISIS paperwork and financial information, Mr. Lister and U.S. officials said. American military analysts on Tuesday were poring over the captured material, which officials said could lead to future raids.
“Another victory added to by the heroes of our armed forces to the record of victories against terrorism,” Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool, a spokesman for Iraq’s military, said in a statement on X.
The Iraqi government rarely mentions the U.S. role in operations targeting the Islamic State. The Iraqi military statement about this latest mission barely acknowledged the U.S. involvement, noting that the operation was carried out with the “intelligence and technical cooperation and coordination from the international coalition.”
Over the weekend, while meeting with Maj. Gen. Kevin Leahy, the top U.S. commander in Baghdad, Mr. Sudani said that “the remnants of ISIS no longer pose a threat to the Iraqi state, as they have become isolated groups hiding in remote areas to avoid capture.”
He noted that the Iraqi armed forces were “continuing their operations to track down any remaining terrorists and their hide-outs,” according to a statement posted by the prime minister’s media office.
Mr. Sudani, who is expected to seek a second term as prime minister, has been under pressure from Iran, which borders Iraq, and Iran’s allies inside Iraq to sharply reduce the U.S. military presence in the country.
During the operation last week, seven U.S. personnel were injured, either in falls during the mission or by shrapnel from an explosion, military officials said. Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said on Tuesday that five of the soldiers had returned to duty and that two had been flown to a military hospital in Germany for additional treatment. None of the injuries were considered life-threatening, officials said.
NBC News previously reported that U.S. service members were injured in the raid.
At its peak, the ISIS caliphate, or religious state, was as large as Britain, stretching from the Levant to Southeast Asia, with more than 40,000 fighters from more than 80 countries. It sought to enforce its extreme interpretation of Islam, including by attacking religious minority groups and punishing Muslims deemed to be apostates.
A coalition of more than 80 countries led by the United States was formed to fight the group, which lost its hold on the territory it controlled in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria in 2019.
However, the militants have continued to operate in the Anbar Desert in Iraq and Syria and in a few other pockets, with some 2,500 fighters still at large, American officials said.
“ISIS continues to pose a threat,” General Ryder told reporters.
On Monday, Central Command announced that U.S. and Syrian Democratic Forces troops, America’s ally in northeast Syria, had captured an ISIS leader, Khaled Ahmed al Dandal, who was helping five ISIS fighters who had fled a detention center in Raqqa, Syria. Two of the escaped ISIS fighters were recaptured; the other three remain at large, the military said.
Syrian Democratic Forces, with help from the United States, are holding more than 9,000 ISIS detainees at more than 20 detention facilities in northeastern Syria. ISIS leaders have repeatedly tried to break fighters out of the jails and reconstitute their terrorist ranks. Another 43,000 people, including family members of ISIS fighters, are being held at Al Hol and Al Roj camps in the same region, according to Central Command.
American counterterrorism specialists have long voiced fears that the camps have become incubators for the next generation of Islamic extremists.
“If a large number of these ISIS fighters escaped, it would pose an extreme danger to the region and beyond,” Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, the leader of Central Command, said in a statement on Monday.
Source » nytimes.com
