“A terrorist shelter was monitored in Hawi al-Labwa within the Zarqa area in the Salahaddin Operations Command sector … and F-16 aircraft carried out an airstrike targeting this guesthouse completely destroying it,” the Iraqi army’s Joint Operations Command said in a statement.
The strike killed an unspecified number of suspected ISIS members inside the base, the statement added.
ISIS seized control of swathes of territory in northern and central Iraq in 2014. But their so-called caliphate was brought to an end in 2017 when Iraqi and Kurdish fighters, supported by a United States-led international coalition, clawed back territory.
Despite its territorial defeat, ISIS has continued to pose a security threat in Iraq through hit-and-run attacks, bombings, and abductions, particularly in the disputed territories that stretch across several provinces including Diyala, Salahaddin, Kirkuk, and Nineveh.
In its latest report on anti-ISIS operations, the Pentagon said that ISIS is a bigger threat in Syria than it is in Iraq.
In Iraq, “ISIS displayed limited capabilities, conducting the lowest number of attacks observed since the onset of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq in 2003. The group also showed no significant improvement in attack sophistication,” said the report from October 29.
On Friday, a similar Iraqi strike in Kirkuk killed five ISIS militants, in an area disputed between the federal government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).
