A policeman identified as Hassan Ahmad Jabbar, 53, was killed on Monday morning when suspected ISIS gunmen attacked a police checkpoint in Muqdadiya district, approximately 80 kilometers northeast of Baghdad, Diyala police spokesperson Nihad Mohammed told Rudaw’s Hastyar Qadir.
Mohammed added that a police dispatch chased the militants away from the scene.
ISIS seized large swathes of Iraqi and Syrian territory in 2014 and declared a so-called “caliphate.” While the group was declared territorially defeated in Iraq in 2017, it still continues to pose serious security risks through hit-and-run attacks, bombings, and abductions across several provinces.
The terror group is particularly active in the disputed territories between Erbil and Baghdad, stretching across several provinces including Kirkuk, Salahaddin, and Diyala.
Over 200 ISIS fighters were killed in Iraq in 2022, Major General Tahsin al-Khafaji, spokesperson for the Joint Operations Command, told Rudaw late December.
A series of deadly ISIS attacks in Iraq’s Kirkuk and Diyala provinces in December killed at least 15 security force members and civilians, attracting condemnations “in the strongest terms” from the UN Security Council.
In the annual statistics published on ISIS’s propaganda magazine, the terror group claimed to have carried out 484 attacks in Iraq in 2022, killing and injuring 833 people.
