Fighters from the Islamic State (IS) group killed eleven people and wounded fifteen others in Diyala province, located in eastern Iraq, the Iraqi army said on Tuesday (October 26th), confirming information from security sources and medical.

In a statement, the joint army commander said the attack targeted "defenseless civilians" in the village of Al-Hawasha, near Muqdadya.

The inhabitants of the village are mainly from the tribe of Bani Tamim, to which the governor of the province belongs, said security sources.

Police reported that the suspects were in vehicles and used semi-automatic weapons. 

The area was cordoned off and reinforcements dispatched for search operations, according to the first source.

A clandestine presence in Iraq and Syria

After a meteoric rise in power in 2014 in Iraq and neighboring Syria and the conquest of vast territories, IS has seen its "caliphate" falter under the impact of successive offensives in these two countries.

Iraq declared victory against the jihadists at the end of 2017 and ISIS was defeated in Syria in 2019. But the jihadists remain a threat and continue to carry out attacks in these two countries.

IS "maintains a largely clandestine presence in Iraq and Syria and leads a sustained insurgency on both sides of the border between the two countries," according to a UN report published in early 2021. In these two countries, the organization jihadist would retain "in all 10,000 active combatants", according to this report.

The last major terrorist attack claimed by ISIS in Iraq last July targeted a market in the Shiite district of Sadr City in Baghdad, which killed around 30 people.

In early September, thirteen members of the Iraqi federal police were killed in an attack perpetrated by ISIS on their checkpoint near Kirkuk (north).

In October, the authorities announced two major arrests in connection with two operations carried out outside Iraq: the person responsible for an attack claimed by ISIS that killed more than 320 people in 2016 in Baghdad.

And a former senior financial official of the ultra-radical organization, wanted by the United States.

With Reuters and AFP

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