The ISIS merry go round continues
Islamic State militants who escaped the defeat of their self-described caliphate in Syria earlier this year have been slipping across the border into Iraq, bolstering a low-level insurgency the group is now waging across the central and northern part of the country, according to security officials.
About 1,000 fighters have crossed into Iraq during the past eight months, most of them in the aftermath of the caliphate’s collapse in March, said Hisham al-Hashimi, a security analyst who advises Iraq’s government and foreign aid agencies.
Those fighters, mostly Iraqis who followed ISIS into Syria, are now returning home to join militant cells that have been digging into rugged rural areas, sustained by intimate knowledge of the local terrain, including concealed tunnels and other hiding places.
The militants move under the cover of darkness to carry out sniper attacks and rudimentary roadside bombings several times per week.
Their attacks, occurring outside major cities, are often opportunistic and primarily target community leaders and security forces involved in efforts to root them out. An explosion earlier this month in the northern city of Kirkuk killed two motorcyclists. A separate attack in Diyala, in eastern Iraq, targeted militiamen assigned with hunting down militants.
B-b-but ISIS was defeated!!! In 2017!!! The press told us that!!!
ISIS was not defeated.
They did lose control of Mosul. But controlling territories is really not the goal of a terrorist organization. They continued to carry out terrorist attacks even after their alleged defeat.
Iraq’s military said Saturday its troops in partnership with security agencies and paramilitary forces launched the second phase of an operation aimed at clearing remnants of the Islamic State group from north of Baghdad and surrounding areas.
This is the second phase of the operation dubbed “Will to Victory,” which started two weeks earlier and targeted the area along the border with Syria. The military said the new target area is north of Baghdad and in the Diyala, Salahuddin and Anbar provinces.
Nothing has changed. Nothing is going to change. XINHUA reports, "Three Islamic State (IS) militants were killed on Saturday in two airstrikes conducted by U.S.-led coalition aircraft in Iraq’s northern province of Nineveh, Iraqi military said."
ISIS is not ever going to be defeated by dropping bombs. The Iraqi government is going to have to stop being so corrupt and stop persecuting the Iraqi people in order to defeat ISIS. When the Iraqi people have a government that works for them, ISIS will not have any real power in Iraq.
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