Eight Iraqis killed as Islamic State group militants launch fresh attack in Diyala

Eight Iraqi civilians were killed and others wounded after Islamic State group militants launched an attack on a village in Iraq’s eastern Diyala province late on Monday, Iraqi officials said. 

"A group of terrorists riding motorcycles at around 8:30 pm attacked  Al-Bubali village... dozens of residents, some of them unarmed, had rushed to confront the attackers," Uday al-Khadran, mayor of Khalis district, told Iraq’s state media the Iraqi News Agency (INA).   

"After half an hour of clashes, eight villagers were martyred and three others were severely wounded."

Iraqi security forces are now conducting operations in the area to chase down the militants.

"There are some suspects who might be interrogated in order to know [the whereabouts of] the perpetrators. There are terrorist outposts near the village that have not been dealt with previously," he added. 

Iraqi military spokesman Yahya Rasool said in a statement that the IS militants' "cowardly actions" were in response to military operations in the area which "have broken the terrorists' backbone and killed their leader".

Iraqi troops were re-deployed in Diyala after a senior security delegation visited the area and will implement a thorough investigation into the incident with a"proper response" to follow, he said. 

إن العمليات العسكرية المنفذة من قبل القطعات الأمنية في مختلف قواطع المسؤولية التي قصمت ظهر الإرهاب وقتلت قيادته بضربات موجعة، قابلتها أعمال جبانة من قبل عناصر عصابات داعش الإرهابية لن تمر من دون عقاب سريع من جانب الأجهزة الأمنية المعنية. pic.twitter.com/K2D60ZRkfa

— يحيى رسول | Yehia Rasool (@IraqiSpoxMOD) December 20, 2022

IS on Sunday claimed responsibility for another attack in Kirkuk province when a roadside bomb killed nine Iraqi police officers. 

IS announced on 30 November that its leader, Abu Hasan al-Hashimi Al-Qurashi, was killed in battle without elaborating on the date of his death or the circumstances. The group also identified its new leader as Abu al-Hussein Al-Husseini Al-Qurashi.

After a meteoric rise in Iraq and Syria in 2014 that saw it conquer vast swathes of territory, IS saw its self-proclaimed "caliphate" collapse under a wave of offensives.

It was defeated in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria two years later, but sleeper cells of the extremist group still carry out attacks in both countries.

IS's previous leader, Abu Ibrahim al-Qurashi, was killed in February this year in a US raid in Idlib province in northern Syria.

His predecessor Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed, also in Idlib, in October 2019.