ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Kirkuk police said Tuesday they have arrested an ISIS sleeper cell that was preparing more violence in the city, which last month experienced deadly attacks in which more than 100 people were killed.
Kirkuk police chief Brig. Khatab Arif told reporters that the cell had collected information on Kirkuk security forces and sent it back to Hawija, 66 km west of Kirkuk and one of the last remaining ISIS strongholds in Iraq.
"We have arrested a terrorist network inside Kirkuk comprising six terrorists who have committed a number of terrorist attacks, both in the past and recently,” he said.
The task of the ISIS cell was to gather information on Kirkuk security forces, help get four suicide bombers into the city and carry out terrorist attacks,” Arif said.
Late last month, more than 100 ISIS militants launched a surprise two-day attack on several government, police and political party offices in Kirkuk in which at least 100 people were killed, most of them security forces personnel.
Since then, Kirkuk security authorities have repeatedly said that the attackers had received help from sleeper cells inside the city, about 175 km southeast of Mosul.
Brig. Sarhad Qadir, head of the Kirkuk Suburban Police, told reporters that the terrorists involved in last month’s attack were sent by ISIS because they were from Kirkuk, knew the city and were able to more easily move around.
Qadir added that a list of wanted terrorists had been distributed to checkpoints around the city, but that identification was more difficult because the terrorists were using fake IDs.
Arif, the Kikruk police chief, said that the cell involved in last month’s ISIS attacks had carried out many such atrocities in the city in the past, when it operated under the al-Qaeda umbrella.
One of the attacks the cell was involved in was in January 2015, when ISIS carried out deadly attacks on Peshmerga positions in southern Kirkuk's Maktab Khalid district, in which tens of Peshmerga soldiers, including the popular Brig. Sherko Shwani, were killed.
