(Baghdad) At least 11 people were killed Tuesday night in Iraq in an attack blamed on Islamic State (IS) jihadists on a village in the east of the country, two security sources reported.
The attack targeted the village of Al-Rachad in Diyala province, leaving “11 dead and 13 injured,” said a security source in the province.
A second source, evoking the presence of civilians among the victims, assured that this attack with the light weapons targeted a village which counts among its inhabitants many members of the security forces.
The area was cordoned off and reinforcements dispatched for search operations, according to the first source.
The inhabitants of the village are mainly from the tribe of Bani Tamim, to which the governor of the province belongs, the two sources said.
After a meteoric rise in power in 2014 in Iraq and neighboring Syria and the conquest of vast territories, IS has seen its “caliphate” falter under the impact of successive offensives in these two countries.
Iraq declared victory against the jihadists at the end of 2017 and ISIS was defeated in Syria in 2019.
But the jihadists remain a threat and continue to carry out attacks in these two countries.
In early September, 13 members of the Iraqi federal police were killed in an IS attack on their checkpoint near Kirkuk (north).
Today ISIS “maintains a largely clandestine presence in Iraq and Syria and leads a sustained insurgency on both sides of the border between the two countries”, according to a UN report published in early 2021.
In these two countries, the jihadist organization would retain “in all 10,000 active combatants”, according to this report.
The last major attack claimed by ISIS in Iraq last July targeted a market in the Shiite district of Sadr City in Baghdad, which killed around 30 people.
In October, the authorities announced two major arrests in connection with two operations carried out outside Iraq: the person responsible for an attack claimed by ISIS that killed more than 320 people in 2016 in Baghdad. And a former senior financial official of the ultra-radical organization, wanted by the United States.