BAGHDAD —
An Iraqi police officer was murdered about two weeks after
Daesh kidnapped him,
officials said Wednesday.
اضافة اعلان
A low-level Daesh
insurgency continues to disrupt efforts to restore stability to Iraq, which is
scarred by years of warfare and unrest.
The militant group
had released photos purporting to show the decapitated body of Col. Yasser
Al-Jourani, whom they had seized while he was hunting with friends in Iraq’s
Hamrin region earlier this month.
One of his hunting
companions was found shot dead, while a second who had been tortured later died
of his wounds, a security source told AFP.
The spokesman of
Iraq’s armed forces chief said Prime Minister
Mustafa Al-Kadhimi had ordered
that security efforts against Daesh forces be boosted.
“We will pursue
the terrorists to achieve justice and vengeance for our martyrs,” the army
chief’s spokesman said.
Over the past few
days security forces announced a large-scale operation in the mountainous
Hamrin region.
Iraqi military
operations and airstrikes killed “five Daesh agents”, leading to the discovery
of several “terrorist caches” containing bombs and weapons, a statement from
Iraq’s security forces read.
“Two bodies of two
kidnapped people were found,” it added, without naming the victims.
Daesh overran large
swathes of northern and western Iraq in a lighting offensive in 2014 before
eventually succumbing to counter-attacks by government forces backed by a
US-led coalition in 2017.
Today, Daesh
maintains a largely clandestine presence in Iraq and Syria and conducts a
sustained insurgency on both sides of the border, according to a
UN report
published early this year.
Across the two
countries, Daesh is believed to retain about 10,000 active fighters, according
to the report.
The last major
attack claimed by Daesh in Iraq targeted a market in Baghdad’s Shiite
neighborhood of Sadr City in July and killed about 30 people.
Read more Region and World
.jpg)
.jpg)
