Baghdad (IraqiNews.com) Six Islamic State members, including a woman, were arrested in operations in Nineveh province, the Iraqi Interior Ministry announced on Friday.

In a press release, the ministry said troops in Nineveh “arrested six Islamic State members, including a woman. All are wanted for by courts for trials.”

“Two of them were arrested in Abu Maria village in Tal Afar, while the rest were in several areas across Mosul,” the ministry added.

Last week, news reports quoted sources as saying that over 20 IS members were arrested in several security operations carried out in west of Mosul.

Thousands of Islamic State militants as well as Iraqi civilians were killed since the government campaign, backed by paramilitary troops and the coalition was launched in October 2016 to fight the militant group, which declared a self-styled “caliphate” from Mosul in June 2014.

Islamic State continues to launch sporadic attacks across Iraq against security troops. Security reports indicate that the militant group still poses threat against stability in the country.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi announced, in December, full liberation of Iraqi lands, declaring end of war against IS members. The war against IS has displaced at least five million people.





</s>Baghdad (IraqiNews.com) Six Islamic State members, including a woman, were arrested in operations in Nineveh province, the Iraqi Interior Ministry announced on Friday.

In a press release, the ministry said troops in Nineveh “arrested six Islamic State members, including a woman. All are wanted for by courts for trials.”

“Two of them were arrested in Abu Maria village in Tal Afar, while the rest were in several areas across Mosul,” the ministry added.

Last week, news reports quoted sources as saying that over 20 IS members were arrested in several security operations carried out in west of Mosul.

Thousands of Islamic State militants as well as Iraqi civilians were killed since the government campaign, backed by paramilitary troops and the coalition was launched in October 2016 to fight the militant group, which declared a self-styled “caliphate” from Mosul in June 2014.

Islamic State continues to launch sporadic attacks across Iraq against security troops. Security reports indicate that the militant group still poses threat against stability in the country.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi announced, in December, full liberation of Iraqi lands, declaring end of war against IS members. The war against IS has displaced at least five million people.</s>Baku. 3 May. REPORT.AZ/ Several hundred Yazidi captives have been killed in Iraq by Islamic State (IS) militants west of Mosul, Yazidi and Iraqi officials say.

A statement from the Yazidi Progress Party said 300 captives were killed on Friday in the Tal Afar district near the city.

Report informs referring the information given by the BBC, Iraqi Vice-President Osama al-Nujaifi described the reported deaths as "horrific and barbaric".

Thousands of members of the religious minority group were captured last year.

It is not clear how they were killed, or why this has happened now, says the BBC's Middle East editor Alan Johnston.

Many are reported to have been held in Mosul, the main stronghold of IS after the militants swept through large areas of northern and western Iraq, and eastern Syria in 2014.</s>Authorities in Mosul have buried more than 1,000 bodies in a mass grave in a desert valley outside the city, most of them believed to be Islamic State group militants, according to a city official. More remains are being dug out of the rubble of the district where the fighters made their final stand last year.

Hundreds more bodies are still strewn across or buried in Maydan district nine months after it was flattened in the final battles to retake Mosul, creating one of the grimmest scenes from a brutal war that was compared to the worst urban combat of World War II.

During a recent visit by The Associated Press, pieces of desiccated bodies, often in shreds of fighters’ uniforms, were visible scattered in the ruins, which are also laced with unexploded bombs and unused suicide belts. In one place, the crown of a skull stuck out of the dirt, brilliant white with a fringe of leathery scalp and hair. One man lay crushed under the wreck of a car, his legs sticking up in the air.

Most of the bodies appeared to belong to IS fighters killed by airstrikes or shelling, their remains half-buried. But there were also women and small children. The body of baby girl, turned ghoulish brown, lay on the balcony of a half-collapsed building, covered by bits of rubble.

The scene is testimony to Iraqi authorities’ lack of resources and the overwhelming task they face in just digging out from the destruction wreaked across Mosul in the 9-month offensive by Iraqi forces backed by the U.S.-led coalition that finally defeated IS here. Multiple neighborhoods suffered heavy damage. Clearing of rubble is largely financed by the United Nations’ development agency, and repairs are proceeding slowly. In some areas, streets have been cleared but many buildings remain shattered.

Maydan is at a further disadvantage because Iraqi officials don’t appear to see removing bodies of IS fighters as a high priority. The provincial council’s office told the AP that clearing the area was the job of the civil defense; the civil defense said it was the job of the morgue; the head of the morgue declined to comment.

Faris Abdulrazzaq, mayor of Maydan, said the failure to clear the area — not just the bodies, but also the huge amount of unexploded ordnance — was preventing residents from returning to rebuild what they can, as others have in other districts.

“Even when you pass by a dead cat, you feel the smell and you try to get rid of it. How do you think hundreds of dead bodies smell?” he said. “I wonder why all these government officials are leaving this problem to fester all this time. This is the first thing they should take care of.”

He expressed fears over the health impact of the bodies. The World Health Organization has often noted that even large numbers of bodies left after a disaster do not pose a major health risk, since the victims die of trauma not epidemic and bacteria involved in decomposition are not dangerous.

But the stench of decay rising from the ruins is oppressive, and temperatures are only now starting to rise into the upper 20s Celsius (80s Fahrenheit).

Even by the awful standards of Mosul, the devastation is shocking in this part of the Old City stretching roughly a kilometer (half mile) along the Tigris River. The piles of dirt, rubble, smashed concrete, metal and vehicle skeletons are so high it is barely possible in many places to tell where the street ended and the buildings once began.

Iraqi and U.S.-led coalition forces dropped vast amounts of explosives on this small area to break IS fighters’ resistance last July in the last weeks of the 9-month-long assault that free Mosul from the militant group’s rule. The fighters held out the longest in Maydan, a neighborhood of tiny, winding alleyways and closely built homes.

Bashar al-Kiki, the head of the provincial council for Nineveh governorate, told the AP on Thursday that the municipal government had no resources to clean up the site. The bodies are collected by civilian volunteers, then taken by the municipality to the city morgue and finally to a mass burial site in a desert valley near Sahaji, a town west of Mosul, he said.

He estimated that 1,000 bodies had been buried at the site.

Al-Kiki said the morgue makes an effort to identify the bodies or at least to tell if they belonged to fighters or civilians, but lack of resources prevents them from carrying out a proper identification process.

This week, a band of young volunteers wearing plastic gloves worked amid the rubble, pulling corpses cut in half out from under piles of bricks and putting them into white body bags. Some said that occasionally during their work in the past months they’ve been harassed by security forces asking why they are bothering to deal with IS bodies.

The leader of the team, 23-year-old Surur Abdulkarim, said that in the past six months they had collected 650 bodies. She said the aim was to clear out as many as possible before the heat of summer.

She said their operation was entirely self-financed except for a one-off donation of some body bags and protective clothing by the aid group Medicines Sans Frontieres. Several times a week they turn up at the site with a few bags, fill them with corpses, and then leave them by the roadside for the municipality to pick up.

Iraqi and U.S. officials have never given a detailed estimate of how many IS militants were killed in Mosul, only putting the figure in the thousands. Thousands more escaped and continued to fight elsewhere in Iraq or in Syria.

An AP investigation last year found that between 9,000 and 11,000 civilians died in the battle to retake Mosul from the Islamic State group, at least a third of them killed by Iraqi or coalition bombardment.

The extremists had controlled the city, Iraq’s second largest, since June 2014, when they declared their “caliphate” over a third of Iraq and Syria. Nearly all of that territory has been wrested back in the campaign led by U.S.-backed Iraqi and Syrian forces, except for small pockets held by IS in Syria.</s>Authorities in Mosul have buried more than 1,000 bodies in a mass grave in a desert valley outside the city, most of them believed to be Islamic State group militants, according to a city official. More remains are being dug out of the rubble of the district where the fighters made their final stand last year.

Hundreds more bodies are still strewn across or buried in Maydan district nine months after it was flattened in the final battles to retake Mosul, creating one of the grimmest scenes from a brutal war that was compared to the worst urban combat of World War II.

During a recent visit by The Associated Press, pieces of desiccated bodies, often in shreds of fighters' uniforms, were visible scattered in the ruins, which are also laced with unexploded bombs and unused suicide belts. In one place, the crown of a skull stuck out of the dirt, brilliant white with a fringe of leathery scalp and hair. One man lay crushed under the wreck of a car, his legs sticking up in the air.

Most of the bodies appeared to belong to IS fighters killed by airstrikes or shelling, their remains half-buried. But there were also women and small children. The body of baby girl, turned ghoulish brown, lay on the balcony of a half-collapsed building, covered by bits of rubble.

The scene is testimony to Iraqi authorities' lack of resources and the overwhelming task they face in just digging out from the destruction wreaked across Mosul in the 9-month offensive by Iraqi forces backed by the U.S.-led coalition that finally defeated IS here. Multiple neighborhoods suffered heavy damage. Clearing of rubble is largely financed by the United Nations' development agency, and repairs are proceeding slowly. In some areas, streets have been cleared but many buildings remain shattered.

Maydan is at a further disadvantage because Iraqi officials don't appear to see removing bodies of IS fighters as a high priority. The provincial council's office told the AP that clearing the area was the job of the civil defense; the civil defense said it was the job of the morgue; the head of the morgue declined to comment.

Faris Abdulrazzaq, mayor of Maydan, said the failure to clear the area — not just the bodies, but also the huge amount of unexploded ordnance — was preventing residents from returning to rebuild what they can, as others have in other districts.

"Even when you pass by a dead cat, you feel the smell and you try to get rid of it. How do you think hundreds of dead bodies smell?" he said. "I wonder why all these government officials are leaving this problem to fester all this time. This is the first thing they should take care of."

He expressed fears over the health impact of the bodies. The World Health Organization has often noted that even large numbers of bodies left after a disaster do not pose a major health risk, since the victims die of trauma not epidemic and bacteria involved in decomposition are not dangerous.

But the stench of decay rising from the ruins is oppressive, and temperatures are only now starting to rise into the upper 20s Celsius (80s Fahrenheit).

Even by the awful standards of Mosul, the devastation is shocking in this part of the Old City stretching roughly a kilometer (half mile) along the Tigris River. The piles of dirt, rubble, smashed concrete, metal and vehicle skeletons are so high it is barely possible in many places to tell where the street ended and the buildings once began.

Iraqi and U.S.-led coalition forces dropped vast amounts of explosives on this small area to break IS fighters' resistance last July in the last weeks of the 9-month-long assault that free Mosul from the militant group's rule. The fighters held out the longest in Maydan, a neighborhood of tiny, winding alleyways and closely built homes.

Bashar al-Kiki, the head of the provincial council for Nineveh governorate, told the AP on Thursday that the municipal government had no resources to clean up the site. The bodies are collected by civilian volunteers, then taken by the municipality to the city morgue and finally to a mass burial site in a desert valley near Sahaji, a town west of Mosul, he said.

He estimated that 1,000 bodies had been buried at the site.

Al-Kiki said the morgue makes an effort to identify the bodies or at least to tell if they belonged to fighters or civilians, but lack of resources prevents them from carrying out a proper identification process.

This week, a band of young volunteers wearing plastic gloves worked amid the rubble, pulling corpses cut in half out from under piles of bricks and putting them into white body bags. Some said that occasionally during their work in the past months they've been harassed by security forces asking why they are bothering to deal with IS bodies.

The leader of the team, 23-year-old Surur Abdulkarim, said that in the past six months they had collected 650 bodies. She said the aim was to clear out as many as possible before the heat of summer.

She said their operation was entirely self-financed except for a one-off donation of some body bags and protective clothing by the aid group Medicines Sans Frontieres. Several times a week they turn up at the site with a few bags, fill them with corpses, and then leave them by the roadside for the municipality to pick up.

Iraqi and U.S. officials have never given a detailed estimate of how many IS militants were killed in Mosul, only putting the figure in the thousands. Thousands more escaped and continued to fight elsewhere in Iraq or in Syria.

An AP investigation last year found that between 9,000 and 11,000 civilians died in the battle to retake Mosul from the Islamic State group, at least a third of them killed by Iraqi or coalition bombardment.

The extremists had controlled the city, Iraq's second largest, since June 2014, when they declared their "caliphate" over a third of Iraq and Syria. Nearly all of that territory has been wrested back in the campaign led by U.S.-backed Iraqi and Syrian forces, except for small pockets held by IS in Syria.</s>Authorities in Mosul have buried more than 1,000 bodies in a mass grave in a desert valley outside the city, most of them believed to be Islamic State group militants, according to a city official. More remains are being dug out of the rubble of the district where the fighters made their final stand last year.

Hundreds more bodies are still strewn across or buried in Maydan district nine months after it was flattened in the final battles to retake Mosul, creating one of the grimmest scenes from a brutal war that was compared to the worst urban combat of World War II.

During a recent visit by The Associated Press, pieces of desiccated bodies, often in shreds of fighters' uniforms, were visible scattered in the ruins, which are also laced with unexploded bombs and unused suicide belts. In one place, the crown of a skull stuck out of the dirt, brilliant white with a fringe of leathery scalp and hair. One man lay crushed under the wreck of a car, his legs sticking up in the air.

Most of the bodies appeared to belong to IS fighters killed by airstrikes or shelling, their remains half-buried. But there were also women and small children. The body of baby girl, turned ghoulish brown, lay on the balcony of a half-collapsed building, covered by bits of rubble.

The scene is testimony to Iraqi authorities' lack of resources and the overwhelming task they face in just digging out from the destruction wreaked across Mosul in the 9-month offensive by Iraqi forces backed by the U.S.-led coalition that finally defeated IS here. Multiple neighborhoods suffered heavy damage. Clearing of rubble is largely financed by the United Nations' development agency, and repairs are proceeding slowly. In some areas, streets have been cleared but many buildings remain shattered.

Maydan is at a further disadvantage because Iraqi officials don't appear to see removing bodies of IS fighters as a high priority. The provincial council's office told the AP that clearing the area was the job of the civil defense; the civil defense said it was the job of the morgue; the head of the morgue declined to comment.

Faris Abdulrazzaq, mayor of Maydan, said the failure to clear the area — not just the bodies, but also the huge amount of unexploded ordnance — was preventing residents from returning to rebuild what they can, as others have in other districts.

"Even when you pass by a dead cat, you feel the smell and you try to get rid of it. How do you think hundreds of dead bodies smell?" he said. "I wonder why all these government officials are leaving this problem to fester all this time. This is the first thing they should take care of."

He expressed fears over the health impact of the bodies. The World Health Organization has often noted that even large numbers of bodies left after a disaster do not pose a major health risk, since the victims die of trauma not epidemic and bacteria involved in decomposition are not dangerous.

But the stench of decay rising from the ruins is oppressive, and temperatures are only now starting to rise into the upper 20s Celsius (80s Fahrenheit).

Even by the awful standards of Mosul, the devastation is shocking in this part of the Old City stretching roughly a kilometer (half mile) along the Tigris River. The piles of dirt, rubble, smashed concrete, metal and vehicle skeletons are so high it is barely possible in many places to tell where the street ended and the buildings once began.

Iraqi and U.S.-led coalition forces dropped vast amounts of explosives on this small area to break IS fighters' resistance last July in the last weeks of the 9-month-long assault that free Mosul from the militant group's rule. The fighters held out the longest in Maydan, a neighborhood of tiny, winding alleyways and closely built homes.

Bashar al-Kiki, the head of the provincial council for Nineveh governorate, told the AP on Thursday that the municipal government had no resources to clean up the site. The bodies are collected by civilian volunteers, then taken by the municipality to the city morgue and finally to a mass burial site in a desert valley near Sahaji, a town west of Mosul, he said.

He estimated that 1,000 bodies had been buried at the site.

Al-Kiki said the morgue makes an effort to identify the bodies or at least to tell if they belonged to fighters or civilians, but lack of resources prevents them from carrying out a proper identification process.

This week, a band of young volunteers wearing plastic gloves worked amid the rubble, pulling corpses cut in half out from under piles of bricks and putting them into white body bags. Some said that occasionally during their work in the past months they've been harassed by security forces asking why they are bothering to deal with IS bodies.

The leader of the team, 23-year-old Surur Abdulkarim, said that in the past six months they had collected 650 bodies. She said the aim was to clear out as many as possible before the heat of summer.

She said their operation was entirely self-financed except for a one-off donation of some body bags and protective clothing by the aid group Medicines Sans Frontieres. Several times a week they turn up at the site with a few bags, fill them with corpses, and then leave them by the roadside for the municipality to pick up.

Iraqi and U.S. officials have never given a detailed estimate of how many IS militants were killed in Mosul, only putting the figure in the thousands. Thousands more escaped and continued to fight elsewhere in Iraq or in Syria.

An AP investigation last year found that between 9,000 and 11,000 civilians died in the battle to retake Mosul from the Islamic State group, at least a third of them killed by Iraqi or coalition bombardment.

The extremists had controlled the city, Iraq's second largest, since June 2014, when they declared their "caliphate" over a third of Iraq and Syria. Nearly all of that territory has been wrested back in the campaign led by U.S.-backed Iraqi and Syrian forces, except for small pockets held by IS in Syria.</s>MOSUL/TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) - Islamic State militants attacked a village south of Mosul, killing several people including two journalists, even as they were about to lose their last redoubt in the city to an Iraqi military onslaught, security sources said on Friday.

The assault on Imam Gharbi village appeared to be the sort of diversionary, guerrilla-style strike Islamic State is expected to employ as U.S.-backed Iraqi forces regain control over cities IS captured in a shock 2014 offensive.

 Security sources said IS insurgents had infiltrated Imam Gharbi, some 70 km (44 miles) south of Mosul on the western bank of the Tigris river, on Wednesday evening from a pocket of territory still under their control on the eastern bank. 

 Two Iraqi journalists were reported killed and two others wounded as they covered the security forces' counter-attack to take back the village on Friday. An unknown number of civilians and military were also killed or wounded.

 The fighting forced the U.N.-affiliated International Organization for Migration to suspend relief operations at two sites where it houses nearly 80,000 people near Qayyara, just north of Imam Gharbi, a U.N. statement said.

 With water trucks no longer able to reach the sites, the displaced people could run short of water at a time of midsummer temperatures well over 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), it said.

 The insurgents were still in control of half the village by Friday evening, security sources said. 

 In Mosul, IS clung to a slowly shrinking pocket on the Tigris west bank, battling for every meter with snipers, grenades and suicide bombers, which forced Iraqi troops to fight house-to-house in densely-populated blocks. 

 The Iraqi military has forecast final victory this week in what used to be the de facto capital of IS's "caliphate" in Iraq, after a grinding eight-month, U.S.-backed offensive to wrest back the city, whose pre-war population was 2 million. 

 But security forces faced ferocious resistance from several hundred militants hunkered down among thousands of civilians in the maze of alleyways in Mosul's Old City. 

 Mosul was by far the largest city seized by Islamic State in its offensive three years ago where the ultra-hardline group declared its caliphate over adjoining parts of Iraq and Syria.

 

 ASYMMETRIC ATTACKS

 Stripped of Mosul, IS's dominion in Iraq will be reduced to mainly rural, desert areas west and south of the city where tens of thousands of people live, and the militants are expected to keep up asymmetric attacks on selected targets across Iraq.

 Adhel Abu Ragheef, a Baghdad-based expert on jihadist groups, said Islamic State was likely to carry out "more of these raid-type attacks on security forces to try to divert them away from the main battle", now in Mosul and then in other areas west of Mosul including near the Syrian border still under IS control.

 Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared the end of Islamic State's "state of falsehood" a week ago, after security forces took Mosul's medieval Grand al-Nuri mosque - although only after retreating militants blew it up.

 Months of grinding urban warfare in Mosul have displaced 900,000 people, about half the city's pre-war population, and killed thousands, according to aid organizations.

 The United Nations predicts it will cost more than $1 billion to repair basic infrastructure in Mosul. Iraq's regional Kurdish leader said the Baghdad central government had failed to prepare a post-battle political, security and governance plan.

 The offensive has damaged thousands of structures in Mosul's Old City and destroyed nearly 500 buildings, satellite imagery released by the United Nations on Thursday showed.

 In some of the worst affected areas, almost no buildings appear to have escaped damage, and Mosul's dense construction means the extent of the devastation might be underestimated, U.N. officials said.

 

 (Writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Robin Pomeroy)</s>Mosul (IraqiNews.com) Iraqi police forces arrested six Islamic State militants in the group’s former bastion, Mosul, a police official was quoted saying on Thursday.

Spokesperson of the Interior Ministry, Saad Maan, said in a statement that the six were arrested in al-Wahda neighborhood in eastern Mosul after a raid of searches, adding that those arrested had arrest warrants issued for them based on the anti-terrorism law.

Iraq declared victory over Islamic State militants in December 2017, ending a three-year military campaign against the group to retake areas they had occupied to proclaim a self-styled “caliphate”.

But even after Iraq declared that the militants lost their territorial influence, the group seems to continue to represent a security concern, launching several attacks against security and civilians and causing several death.</s>Iraqi rapid response forces south of Mosul say they've pushed most Islamic State fighters out of a Sunni town where the fighters once had strong support, while other troops liberate a nearby Christian town. Mana Rabiee reports.</s>Iraqi police controlling Hammam al-Alil, a town south of Mosul, distribute humanitarian aid to families fleeing the fighting between Iraqi security forces and Islamic State. Rough Cut (no reporter narration).
The Iraqi Interior Ministry announces the arrest of six alleged Islamic State fighters including one woman in Mosul.