ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A veteran Kurdish Peshmerga commander was killed on Tuesday in a close range confrontation with two ISIS militants in Bashiqa town, northeast of Mosul.
Peshmerga officials declared Bashiqa cleared of ISIS militants on Monday. But the next day, two militants were discovered hiding in a house in the town.
“We had information on Tuesday that there were two ISIS militants left behind at a house inside Bashiqa. Martyred Rahman Faraj broke into the house and confronted the militants, initially killing one militant and wounding the other,” recalled Brig. Fayeq Hassam Sharif, who was a fried of Major General. Faraj killed by the ISIS militants.
Minutes later “the wounded militant detonated his payload, martyring [Faraj].”
Faraj was retired by the government in 2014. But when ISIS swept through the region in mid-2014, he once again picked up arms and returned to the battlefield, participating in many fights against ISIS over the past two years on the Bashiqa and Khazir fronts.
Faraj was born in 1961 and became a Peshmerga in 1977. He was originally from Penjwen town in Sulaimani province.
Kurdish Peshmerga forces took complete control of Bashiqa town, 13 kilometres northeast of Mosul’s outskirts, on Monday.
A Rudaw correspondent on the ground reported Tuesday that there were a few ISIS snipers still left in the town and sporadic clashes were ongoing between the militants and the Peshmerga.
Rudaw’s Shadiya Rasul said the militants were using tunnels and described the clashes as not alley-to-alley but tunnel-to-tunnel.
Bashiqa had a diverse population, with a majority of Yezidis and Shabaks and a minority of Assyrians and Arabs, leading it to be often described as ‘the little Iraq.’
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