Baghdad:

An army officer and four soldiers were killed in an attack on their post in Iraq’s central province of Salaheddin on Monday, officials said.

Iraq’s ministry of defence said that an officer and several members of his regiment were killed “while thwarting a terrorist attack”.

“Daesh terrorists launched an attack” on an army post in the village of Mtebija “killing four soldiers and the regiment commander,” said a security source, using an alternate name for the Islamic State group.

The jihadist group overran large swathes of Iraq and neighbouring Syria in 2014, proclaiming its “caliphate” and launching a reign of terror.

It was defeated in Iraq in 2017 by Iraqi forces backed by a US-led military coalition, and in 2019 lost the last territory it held in Syria to US-backed Kurdish forces.

But its remnants continue to carry out deadly hit-and-run attacks and ambushes, particularly from remote areas and desert hideouts.

In a report published in January, the United Nations said IS has “between 3,000 and 5,000 fighters” across Iraq and Syria.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Nasiriyah:

Iraqi authorities have executed at least 11 people convicted of “terrorism” this week, security and health sources said Wednesday, with rights group Amnesty International condemning an “alarming lack of transparency”.

Under Iraqi law, terrorism and murder offences are punishable by death, and execution decrees must be signed by the president.

A security source in Iraq’s southern Dhi Qar province told AFP that 11 “terrorists from the Islamic State group” were executed by hanging at a prison in the city of Nasiriyah, “under the supervision of a justice ministry team”.

A local medical source confirmed that the health department had received the bodies of 11 executed people.

They were hanged on Monday “under Article 4 of the anti-terrorism law”, the source added, requesting anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

All 11 were from Salahaddin province and the bodies of seven had been returned to their families, the medical official said.

Iraqi courts have handed down hundreds of death and life sentences in recent years for people convicted of membership in “a terrorist group”, an offence that carries capital punishment regardless of whether the defendant had been an active fighter.

Iraq has been criticised for trials denounced by rights groups as hasty, with confessions sometimes obtained under torture.

Amnesty in a statement on Wednesday condemned the latest hangings for “overly broad and vague terrorism charges”.

It said a total of 13 men were executed on Monday, including 11 who had been “convicted on the basis of their affiliation to the so-called Islamic State armed group”.

The two others, arrested in 2008, “were convicted of terrorism-related offences under the Penal Code after a grossly unfair trial”, Amnesty said citing their lawyer.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Ten fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) were killed, Iraqi Kurdish authorities said Thursday, as Turkey said it launched renewed air strikes on northern Iraq.

Turkey has intensified its cross-border air raids against Kurdish targets in northeastern Syria and northern Iraq in retaliation for an October 1 suicide bombing in Ankara which injured two policemen.

That attack was claimed by a branch of the outlawed PKK, which has waged a decades-long insurgency against Turkey and is considered a “terrorist” group by Ankara and its Western allies.

“Nine PKK fighters were killed in a series of air strikes launched by Turkish warplanes and drones” in Arbil province in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, the Kurdish counter-terrorism service said in a statement.

A tenth PKK member was killed and three others wounded in “the bombing of several locations” belonging to the group in Dohuk province, it added.

Turkey’s defence ministry on Thursday confirmed conducting air strikes on targets in five areas of northern Iraq, saying “many terrorists were neutralised”.

“A total of 19 targets including caves, shelters and depots used by terrorists.. were successfully destroyed and many terrorists were neutralised,” it said of the strikes which were carried out on Wednesday.

The Turkish military rarely comments on its operations in Iraq but it frequently carries out ground and air offensives against the PKK and its positions in northern Iraq.

Earlier this month, Turkey’s parliament extended the military’s authorisation to launch cross-border operations in Syria and Iraq by two more years.

Such operations were first approved in 2013 to support the international campaign against the Islamic State group, and have since been renewed annually.

Over the past 25 years, Turkey has installed dozens of military bases in Iraqi Kurdistan to fight against the PKK, which also has outposts there.

The Iraqi federal government in Baghdad and Kurdish authorities in Arbil have for years been accused of turning a blind eye to the Turkish bombardments to preserve their strategic alliance with Ankara, a key trading partner, despite statements protesting violations of Iraqi sovereignty and harm to civilians.

In summer 2022, nine people died when artillery shells hit a recreational park in the Iraqi Kurdish border village of Parakh, with most of those killed holidaymakers from southern Iraq.

Baghdad blamed Turkey for the strike but Ankara denied responsibility and pointed the finger at the PKK.

In late July, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohamed Shia al-Sudani’s office announced that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would visit Iraq but so far, no date has been set.

Raghad Saddam Hussein, the daughter of executed ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
| Photo Credit: AFP

A Baghdad court on Sunday sentenced in absentia the exiled daughter of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to seven years in prison for “promoting” her father’s outlawed Baath party.

The party was dissolved and banned after Hussein was toppled during the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

According to the ruling, which AFP was able to review, Raghad Saddam Hussein was found guilty of the crime of “promoting the activities of the banned Baath party”, during television interviews she gave in 2021.

In Iraq today, anyone showing photos or slogans promoting the ousted regime can be subject to prosecution.

The ruling does not indicate the exact interviews over which she was convicted.

But in 2021, Hussein spoke on the Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya channel about Iraq’s conditions under her father’s iron-fisted rule from 1979 to 2003.

“Many people told me that our period was indeed a time of glory, of pride,” she told the Saudi channel. “Of course, the country was stable and rich.”

Hussein lives in Jordan, along with her sister Rana. Their brothers, Uday and Qusay, were killed by the US army in Mosul in 2003.

For the majority of Iraqis, the quarter century during which Saddam Hussein ruled is still seen as a time of brutal repression.

An exchange of fire began in Rajouri’s Kalakote between hiding militants and security forces. File representative image
| Photo Credit: PTI

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Baghdad, Iraq:

An Iraqi court on Thursday sentenced an Islamic State group member to death after convicting him of involvement in a 2014 suicide bombing that killed 17 pilgrims, the judiciary said.

The attack in Taji district north of Baghdad targeted a “mawkeb”, one of the many stalls providing free food and drinks to pilgrims during Shiite Muslim festivals.

The pilgrims had been heading on foot to Samarra, about 100 kilometres (60 miles) north of Baghdad, to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Hassan al-Askari, one of 12 imams revered by Iraq’s Shiite majority.

A criminal court in Baghdad on Thursday sentenced “a terrorist to death for the explosion of a mawkeb in 2014” during the pilgrimage in Samarra, the judiciary said on its website.

The statement did not name the convict but said he had “filmed the tragedy because he was a member of the terrorist groups of Daesh,” using the Arabic acronym for IS.

The convict has the right to appeal the verdict.

After rapidly taking over large swathes of territory in Iraq and neighbouring Syria, IS saw its self-proclaimed “caliphate” collapse under successive offensives in both countries.

Iraqi authorities declared “victory” over the Sunni Muslim extremist group at the end of 2017, but jihadist cells continue to sporadically launch attacks, particularly on military and police personnel in remote areas of central and northern Iraq.

In late August, three people were hanged in Iraq after being convicted over an IS attack that killed 323 people in Baghdad in July 2016.

Amnesty International said Iraq was the world’s sixth biggest executioner last year, with at least 11 carried out.

More than 41 death sentences were issued in 2022, and more than 45 people were executed in 2020, according to the London-based human rights group.

 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)