Iraq Captures 5 Senior Daesh Commanders

11 May 2018 International

US President Donald Trump said on Thursday that five “most wanted” leaders of the Islamic State militant group had been captured, an apparent reference to the capture of five commanders of the militant group by Iraq.

“Five Most Wanted leaders of ISIS just captured!” Trump wrote in a post on Twitter, providing no further details. Iraq had described the capture of the Islamic State commanders as “some of the most wanted” leaders of the group.

The list did not include Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Iraqi forces in coordination with US-backed Syrian forces have captured five senior Islamic State group leaders, the US-led coalition said Thursday in a statement.

The arrest was a “significant blow to DAESH,” coalition spokesman Army Col Ryan Dillon said, using the Arabic acronym for the extremist group. Islamic State fighters no longer control significant pockets of territory inside Iraq but do maintain a grip inside Syria along Iraq’s border.

The US-led coalition supported Iraqi ground forces and Syrian fighters known as the Syrian Democratic Forces in the more than three-year war against Islamic State.

After Iraqi forces retook the Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State last summer, Syrian forces on the other side of the border claimed a series of swift victories, but the campaign was stalled recently when Turkey launched a cross-border raid into Syria’s north. Earlier this month, the coalition announced a drive to clear the final pockets of Islamic State territory inside Syria.

Trump tweeted about the raid Thursday, saying those arrested were the “five most wanted” Islamic State “leaders.” Last year the Pentagon said that there were “some indicators” that al- Baghdadi was still alive a month after Russia claimed to have killed him in a strike near the Syrian city of Raqqa.

None of the statements released Thursday from the president or the coalition named the Islamic State fighters arrested. Islamic State fighters swept into Iraq in the summer of 2014, taking control of nearly a third of the country. At the height of the group’s power their selfproclaimed caliphate stretched from the edges of Aleppo in Syria to just north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad.

Now, with the group’s physical caliphate largely destroyed, anti-Islamic State operations are increasingly focused on targeting the extremists’ remaining leadership. In other news, around one million soldiers, police and other security personnel voted across Iraq on Thursday in the first national elections since the country declared victory over the Islamic State group.

Servicemen in uniform queued up to cast their ballots two days before the rest of the country heads to the polls for a parliamentary election Saturday, just five months after the battle against the jihadists drew to a close.

 

SOURCE : ARABTIMES

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