Eight civilians were killed in Iraq by armed assailants who targeted their village north of Baghdad, local officials said who denounced a “terrorist” attack on Tuesday.
Monday evening’s attack, which was not immediately claimed, targeted the village of Al-Bou Bali, in the region of Al-Khalis.
“A group of terrorists on motorcycles attacked the village of Al-Bou Bali on three axes,” said the mayor of the city of Al-Khalis, Odaï al-Khadran, quoted Tuesday by the official news agency INA. .
“The village is inhabited by farmers (…), dozens of inhabitants mobilized to deal with the terrorist attack,” he said, reporting “eight dead and three injured”.
Residents of this area once formed a paramilitary unit to defend their land against the Islamic State (IS) group after it rose to power in 2014, an interior ministry official told AFP. covered with anonymity. He blamed the attack on the jihadists.
The Ministry of Defense announced in a press release the dispatch of a high-ranking delegation to the province of Diyala, where the attack took place, “to bring to light the circumstances of the criminal drama”.
The attack comes after an ambush claimed by IS, which killed nine people on Sunday in the ranks of the federal police in the vicinity of Kirkuk.
After a meteoric rise in power and the conquest of vast territories in Iraq and neighboring Syria, the IS saw its self-proclaimed “caliphate” crumble under the blow of successive offensives in these two countries.
While Iraq declared victory against IS in 2017, jihadists remain active in several areas and continue to carry out attacks, most often against security forces.
The security forces are carrying out counter-terrorism operations and regularly announcing the death of dozens of jihadists in airstrikes or raids.
Exploiting the porous border between Iraq and Syria, the jihadist organization would retain “between 6,000 and 10,000 fighters in these two countries, concentrated mainly in rural areas, mainly Iraqi and Syrian nationals”, underlined a UN report published in summer 2022.
Referring to the ambush against the federal police in a speech Monday evening, Prime Minister Mohamed Chia al-Soudani denounced “mistakes by the security services”. “There is a clear failure which led to this tragedy, it will be necessary to render accounts”, he said.