Over a dozen Iraqi security service members have been killed in a string of attacks that have rocked the country this week, attacks government officials are blaming on the remnants of the Islamic State (IS).
On Sunday, a bomb blast hit a police truck in the northern province of Kirkuk and was followed by “a direct attack with small arms,” a federal officer notified AFP.
Although no militant group has claimed responsibility for Sunday’s attack, the carnage comes on the heels of Wednesday’s roadside IED strike outside Baghdad. The attack claimed three lives.
Iraqi officials are now casting the blame on the tattered remnants of IS that have remained in the country since the group’s main defeat in December 2017.
IS first burst onto the scene in Iraq in 2014 when the group declared a “caliphate” across vast swaths of Iraq and Syria. Three years later, following its defeat at the hands of an American-led military coalition supported by local troops, the caliphate was dismantled and power returned to government forces.
Last year, the United Nations (UN) warned that despite “significant leadership losses” IS remained capable of exploiting “security gaps and conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism to recruit and to organise and execute complex attacks.”
Northern Iraq has proven to be particularly difficult for local Iraqi forces to defend. Last month, four were killed on in an attack on a military outpost in the region.
The Islamic State once held nearly 35,000 square miles of Iraqi territory and boasts as many as 10,000 soldiers spread across rural stretches of Iraq and Syria, the BBC reports.
For its part, the United States has preserved a skeleton crew military presence across Iraq since its main drawdown of forces concluded at the end of 2021. America still retains approximately 2,500 soldiers in Iraq in a training and advisory capacity.
Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sundani called the violence a “cowardly terrorist attack,” encouraging local forces to show “vigilance, carefully inspect the roads and not provide any opportunity for terrorist elements.”