Anbar (Iraqinews.com) – A senior Islamic State (IS) leader was arrested Wednesday along with one of his aides in a successful air landing operation in Anbar governorate, Sky News Arabia reported.

In a statement, the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service said that a group of its troops, backed by Iraqi warplanes, carried out a successful air landing operation in Anbar governorate, apprehending the Islamic State’s so-called desert emir Saab Abdullah al-Issawi and one of his assistants.

According to the statement, Issawi was responsible for preparing booby-trapped vehicles in a location deep into the desert.

Iraq declared victory over Islamic State in December with the help of a US-led alliance, having retaken all the territory captured by the extremists in 2014 and 2015.

Isolated cells believed to be linked to the Islamic State group remain active in some parts of the country. In recent weeks, suspected Islamic State insurgents have carried out several attacks targeting security forces in different areas across Iraq.

The Islamic State group appeared on the international scene in 2014 when it seized large swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria, declaring the establishment of an Islamic “caliphate” from Mosul city.

Later on, the group has become notorious for its brutality, including mass killings, abductions and beheadings, prompting the U.S. to lead an international coalition to destroy it.







</s>Kirkuk (Iraqinews.com) – Iraqi policemen, backed by pro-government forces, killed on Tuesday six Islamic State (IS) militants in Hawija district in Kirkuk, a security source was quoted as saying.

Speaking to Alghad Press, the source said, “A joint force from the Iraqi police and the Tribal Mobilization Forces stormed a secret tunnel used by IS militants between al-Fara and Hosayneya villages in al-Zab area in Hawija.”

“Fierce clashes erupted between the two sides, leaving six IS insurgents killed,” the source pointed out. He noted the operation comes as part of Iraq’s efforts to track down IS cells nationwide.

In October, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared that Iraqi troops recaptured Hawija, a main town held by Islamic State in the country.

The town had fallen to IS in June 2014, when the militant group seized control of much of northern and western Iraq and proclaimed the creation of a self-styled “caliphate”.

There, Islamic State’s reign forced thousands to flee to refugee camps, while hundreds had been executed by the group for attempting to escape the area or contacting security forces.

Despite the group’s defeat at its main havens across Iraqi provinces, Islamic State continues to launch sporadic attacks across Iraq against troops. Security reports indicate that the militant group still poses a threat against stability in the country.</s>Rawa (IraqiNews.com) Two Iraqi civilians were killed when an explosive device leftover from Islamic State’s occupation of Anbar province went off, a military source was quoted saying on Thursday

Alsumaria News quoted the source saying that two civilians were cleaning up their home in Rawa, a former Islamic State militants’ stronghold in western Anbar, but the house turned out to be booby-trapped, and exploded with them inside.

On Wednesday, an army officer and a shepherd were killed in the same city due to leftover explosive ordnance.Islamic State militants invaded several Iraqi cities in 2014 and proclaimed a self-styled Islamic “Caliphate”. An Iraqi government campaign, backed by a United States-led coalition managed to retake areas occupied by the militants, ending with Rawa, IS’s last bastion in the country, which was retaken in November.

Leftover explosives continue to pose a threat at areas seized back from the militants, occasionally leaving deaths among civilians and security memners, according to local news reports.

Fawzi Yassin, commander of the province’s civil defense directorate, told Alsumaria News in December that the service’s teams, over the past two years, cleared and destroyed more than 38.174 projectiles from areas recaptured by security forces.

Since 2015, United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) cleared 390 priority locations in Falluja and Ramadi in Anbar province, removing more than 2,600 explosive hazards from areas reclaimed from Islamic State.</s>Anbar (IraqiNews.com)Two civilians were wounded as a bomb exploded under the rubble of one of the houses, in central Ramadi, west Anbar, a security source from Anbar police was quoted saying on Wednesday.

Speaking to BasNews, the source said, “a bomb from the remnants of IS went off while a family was trying to lift the debris of their destroyed house in al-Andalus district, central Ramadi, which two people injured.”

Moreover, the source said four people were arrested, while huge amounts of weapons were seized in security operation.

“Security forces carried out a wide-scale operation in al-Karma and al-Saqlawiya regions, leaving four people involved in terrorist operations and amounts of weapons confiscated,” the source added.

Abadi announced in December full liberation of Iraqi lands, declaring end of war against IS members. However, Islamic State continues to launch sporadic attacks across Iraq against troops. Security reports indicate that the militant group still poses threat against stability in the country.

Iraqi forces, backed by a U.S.-led coalition and paramilitary troops, have been fighting to retake territories Islamic State had occupied since 2016.

A total of 91 Iraqi civilians were killed and 208 others were injured in acts of terrorism, violence and armed conflict in February, according to the monthly report issued by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI).

Baghdad was the worst affected Governorate, with 195 civilian casualties (49 killed, 146 injured). Anbar Governorate ranked second place, with 14 killed and 37 injured, and Diyala had 12 killed and 11 injured.</s>SANLIURFA, Turkey — When Abu Hamza, a former Syrian rebel, agreed to join the Islamic State, he did so assuming he would become a part of its promised Islamist utopia, which has lured foreign jihadis from around the globe.

Instead, he found himself being supervised by an Iraqi emir and receiving orders from shadowy Iraqis who moved in and out of the battlefield in Syria. When Abu Hamza disagreed with fellow commanders at an Islamic State meeting last year, he said, he was placed under arrest on the orders of a masked Iraqi man who had sat silently through the proceedings.

Abu Hamza, who became the group’s ruler in a small community in Syria, never discovered the Iraqis’ real identities, which were cloaked by code names. All of the men, however, were former Iraqi officers who served under Saddam Hussein, including the masked man, who once had worked for an Iraqi intelligence agency and now belonged to the Islamic State’s own shadowy security service, he said.

His account, and those of others who have lived with or fought against the Islamic State over the past two years, underscore the pervasive role played by members of Iraq’s former Baathist army in an organization more typically associated with foreign jihadis and the gruesome videos in which they star.

Even with the influx of thousands of foreign fighters, almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers, according to Iraqis, Syrians and analysts who study the group.

They have brought to the organization the military expertise and some of the agendas of the former Baathists, as well as the smuggling networks developed to avoid sanctions in the 1990s and which now facilitate the Islamic State’s illicit oil trading.

In Syria, local emirs are typically shadowed by a deputy who is Iraqi and makes the real decisions, said Abu Hamza, who fled to Turkey last summer after growing disillusioned with the group. He uses a pseudonym because he fears for his safety.

“All the decision makers are Iraqi, and most of them are former Iraqi officers. The Iraqi officers are in command, and they make the tactics and the battle plans,” he said. “But the Iraqis themselves don’t fight. They put the foreign fighters on the front lines.”

The public profile of the foreign jihadis frequently obscures the Islamic State’s roots in the bloody, recent history of Iraq, its brutal excesses as much a symptom as a cause of the country’s woes.

The raw cruelty of Saddam’s Baathist regime, the disbandment of the Iraqi army after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the subsequent insurgency and the marginalization of Sunni Iraqis by the Shiite-dominated government all are intertwined with the Islamic State’s ascent, said Hassan Hassan, a Dubai-based analyst and co-author of the book ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror.

“A lot of people think of the Islamic State as a terrorist group, and it’s not useful,” Hassan said. “It is a terrorist group, but it is more than that. It is a homegrown Iraqi insurgency, and it is organic to Iraq.”

The de-Baathification law promulgated by L. Paul Bremer, Iraq’s American ruler in 2003, has long been identified as one of the contributors to the original insurgency. At a stroke, 400,000 members of the defeated Iraqi army were barred from government employment, denied pensions — and also allowed to keep their guns.

The U.S. military failed in the early years to recognize the role the disbanded Baathist officers would eventually come to play in the extremist group, eclipsing the foreign fighters whom U.S. officials preferred to blame, said Col. Joel Rayburn, a senior fellow at the National Defense University who describes the links between Baathists and the Islamic State in his book, Iraq After America.

Under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph, the former officers became more than relevant. They were instrumental in the group’s rebirth from the defeats inflicted on insurgents by the U.S. military, which is now back in Iraq bombing many of the same men it had already fought.

At first glance, the secularist dogma of Saddam’s tyrannical Baath Party seems at odds with the Islamic State’s harsh interpretation of the Islamic laws it purports to uphold.

But the two creeds broadly overlap in several regards, especially their reliance on fear to secure the submission of the people under the group’s rule. Two decades ago, the elaborate and cruel forms of torture perpetrated by Saddam dominated the discourse about Iraq, much as the Islamic State’s harsh punishments do today.

Like the Islamic State, Saddam’s Baath Party also regarded itself as a transnational movement, forming branches in countries across the Middle East and running training camps for foreign volunteers from across the Arab world.

By the time U.S. troops invaded in 2003, Saddam had begun to tilt toward a more religious approach to governance, making the transition from Baathist to Islamist ideology less improbable for some of the disenfranchised Iraqi officers, said Ahmed al-Hashim, a professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

In the last two years of Saddam’s rule, a campaign of beheadings, mainly targeting women suspected of prostitution and carried out by his elite Fedayeen unit, killed more than 200 people, human rights groups reported at the time. The brutality deployed by the Islamic State today recalls the bloodthirstiness of some of those Fedayeen, Hassan said.

Some of those Baathists became early recruits to the al-Qaeda affiliate established by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Palestinian Jordanian fighter who is regarded as the progenitor of the current Islamic State, said Hisham al Hashemi, an Iraqi analyst.

But it was under the watch of the current Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, that the recruitment of former Baathist officers became a deliberate strategy, according to analysts and former officers.

Al-Baghdadi’s effort was further aided by a new round of de-Baathification launched after U.S. troops left in 2011 by then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who set about firing even those officers who had been rehabilitated by the U.S. military.

Among them was Brig. Gen. Hassan Dulaimi, a former intelligence officer in the old Iraqi army who was recruited back into service by U.S. troops in 2006, as a police commander in Ramadi, capital of Anbar province.

Within months of the U.S. departure, he was dismissed, he said, losing his salary and his pension, along with 124 other officers who had served alongside the Americans.

“The crisis of ISIS didn’t happen by chance,” Dulaimi said in an interview in Baghdad, using an acronym for the Islamic State. “It was the result of an accumulation of problems created by the Americans and the [Iraqi] government.”</s>Anbar (IraqiNews.com) Ten people, including an security personnel as well as civilians were killed and injured in a landmine explosion, west of Anbar, a security source from the province said on Thursday.

“A minefield exploded as a group of shepherds were carrying out their daily tasks at al-Sakra region, west of Haditha town, which left four of them killed,” the source told IkhNews website.

“Explosive experts arrived to the minefield. As they were trying to remove bodies of the victims, another bomb exploded, leaving four soldiers, including an officer, killed and two others wounded,” the source added.

A total of 91 Iraqi civilians were killed and 208 others were injured in acts of terrorism, violence and armed conflict in February, according to the monthly report issued by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI).

Baghdad was the worst affected Governorate, with 195 civilian casualties (49 killed, 146 injured). Anbar Governorate ranked second place, with 14 killed and 37 injured, and Diyala had 12 killed and 11 injured.

Thousands of IS 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.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi announced, in December, full liberation of Iraqi lands, declaring end of war against IS members. However, Islamic State continues to launch sporadic attacks across Iraq against troops. Security reports indicate that the militant group still poses threat against stability in the country.</s>Kirkuk (IraqiNews.com) Iraqi security forces on Tuesday arrested an Islamic State member who, they claim, was behind several ambushes in which security personnel had been killed in the latest period.

Alsumaria News quoted a security source saying that “security forces arrested 11 Islamic State terrorists, including Abu Suleiman al-Afri, who had been responsible for erecting fake checkpoints on the Kirkuk-Baghdad road”.

The source, who asked not to be named, said troops found maps and drafts of attack schemes for the group.

Iraq declared victory over Islamic State militants in December, ending a three-year war to retake areas occupied by the militants in 2014.

Though the government said the group’s territorial influence came to an end, the militants have launched occasional attacks against security forces and civilians, growing fears that it might still pose a security threat.

News reports have said the group had set up several ambushes in which security forces were attacked.

In mid February, the group ambushed several Popular Mobilization Forces members in Saadouniya, Kirkuk, leaving 27 dead. After the attack, Iraqi forces launched offensives to clear remnant militant cells in the province.
Iraqi authorities announce the arrest of alleged senior Islamic State member Saab Abdullah al-Issawi in a military-supported airdrop in Anbar.