Iraqi forces kill six militants in anti-ISIS operations

Attacks by terrorist group in the country have fallen to their lowest recorded level

Iraqi army forces in Baghdad. Six people were killed when they attacked ISIS fighters in Salaheddin and Kirkuk. AFP

Iraqi security forces killed at least six ISIS militants in the neighbouring northern provinces of Salaheddin and Kirkuk on Saturday, the military’s Security Media Cell said.

All six deaths were confirmed in Salaheddin, where troops carried out an operation against the militants with support from local tribes, seizing weapons and equipment, the SMC said.

It said two of the ISIS fighters were suicide bombers. A shepherd in the Tulul Al Baj area was also killed in the raid.

The Iraqi Air Force also carried out strikes with F-16 jets on a cave in Kirkuk where ISIS terrorists were hiding, the SMC said, without giving details on the number of casualties there.

The Iraqi army and paramilitaries that are part of the armed forces regularly carry out raids against ISIS, which still has sleeper cells in areas of northern and western Iraq that the terrorist group controlled from 2014 to 2017.

Recorded ISIS attacks are now at their lowest level, said Joel Wing, a US analyst who has been tracking violence in Iraq since the formation of ISIS in 2013 as a group spanning Iraq and Syria.

The group continues to carry out occasional attacks on civilians and troops, including a raid in January that killed 11 soldiers at an army headquarters in the eastern province of Diyala.

Forces of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region in the north of Iraq known as the Peshmerga also carry out raids against ISIS, sometimes in collaboration with the federal forces.