HALABJA, Kurdistan Region – Five gunmen who wounded a Peshmerga in Halabja and wounded him lightly, were killed on Sunday while one remains on the run. Acting Halabja Governor Ali Othman told Rudaw that the identities of the gunmen, who attacked the Peshmerga on Saturday, still are no definitely known. “Three of the armed men were killed and another two blew themselves up. The search is on for a sixth man,” Othman said. A Peshmerga soldier who was on holiday and was spending some time off with three of his friends in the mountainous areas of the Giryana village, 20 km northeast of Halabja, was injured slightly by the armed men on Saturday afternoon. Mariwan Mohammad, the wounded Peshmerga, had said that he and his friends had seen five gunmen near a pond in Halabja and had called the security forces. “Then, the gunmen saw us and fired on us and I was wounded,” Amin earlier told Rudaw from his hospital bed. The identity of gunmen remains unclear as of now. But one local official from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) said they belong to the so-called Islamic State. Halabja is a stronghold of the PUK, and the party maintains influence among the security forces. “It has been sometime since we had received information that there are a number of ISIS militants in the area of Giryana village of Halabja,” Ahmad Qadafari, the head of the PUK’s branch in Halabja told Rudaw earlier in the day, before the announcement from the Halabja governor. The wounded Peshmerga said the attackers “were speaking in Kurdish and one of them had a long beard,” indicating that they could have been Islamic extremists. Qadafari said the attackers must be from Halabja. He said that if not all of the armed men come from the Halabja, “then certainly a number of them are, because the area has a difficult terrain, and if you are not familiar with it you cannot escape,” he said, referring to the gunmen’s ability to flee after the shootings, before being tracked down. In late August, Kurdish security forces shot dead four gunmen identified as ISIS militants in the Azhdagh mountain in Sangaw in southern Sulaimani.
