ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A top Iraqi army commander and several soldiers were killed in a "terrorist" attack in the Salahaddin province, the Iraqi defense ministry announced on Monday.
The Iraqi defense ministry announced in a statement colonel Khalid Naji Wassak and several other soldiers were killed “as a result of their repelling of a terrorist attack within their operational area.”
Wassak was the commander of the second battalion of the 93rd Infantry Brigade of the Iraqi army that operated in the Salahaddin province, where Islamic State (ISIS) sleeper cells conduct hit-and-run attacks against the Iraqi armed forces.
ISIS has yet to claim responsibility for the attack.
ISIS seized control of swathes of Iraqi territory during a brazen offensive in 2014 but it was declared territorially defeated in 2017 when its so-called caliphate in the country fell as Iraqi and Kurdish fighters, supported by a US-led international coalition, claimed back lands lost to the jihadists.
Despite its territorial defeat, the group has continued to pose a serious security threat to the country through hit-and-run attacks, bombings, and abductions in several provinces, particularly in areas disputed between the Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which stretch across several provinces including Diyala, Salahaddin, and Kirkuk.
The Iraqi government has said that ISIS is no longer a public security threat as the group has been confined. Baghdad is now in talks with the United States to wind down the global mission against the terror group in Iraq.
In its latest report on the anti-ISIS mission released in February, the Pentagon said the terror group has been contained but not eliminated in Iraq: “In Iraq, due to counterterrorism pressure, the ISIS threat was largely contained, though ISIS continued to exploit security gaps between federal Iraq and the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR), and conducted sporadic attacks, mostly in Shia communities.”
