"On Wednesday night at 9:40pm on the Dakai Nuri Mikail village, a number of unidentified armed men, just 100 meters from an Iraqi army security checkpoint stopped and then set alight two trucks, killing one of the drivers, an Arab, right there and the fate of the other driver is unknown as of yet," Brig Gen. Shamal Abdulrahman, director of Asayesh (security) in the town of Koks, Khanaqin, told Rudaw.
Dakai Nuri Mikail is a Kurdish-inhabited village, situated southwest of Khanaqin city.
Abdulrahman added the trucks were on their way to take chicks to a poultry farm in the vicinity of the village.
"The incident happened close to the chicken farm. The owners of the farm, two brothers named Luqman Dawood and Saman Dawood rushed to the scene in order to extinguish the flames. At that point, they were ambushed by the militants, who kidnapped them," he explained.
"The bodies of the two brothers were discovered today near the location where they were abducted."
Brig. Diyar Shawkat, head of Khanaqin police, attributes the attacks to ISIS militants.
"The Daesh militants had established a fake checkpoint last night on the road," Shawkat said.
ISIS has not claimed the killings, but the group is active in the area disputed between Erbil and Baghdad.
Khanaqin, in Diyala province, was under administration of the Kurdistan Regional Government until the events of October 2017, when Baghdad sent federal forces to take over the disputed areas.
The deterioration of Khanaqin's security situation has previously been denounced by the residents, who have staged strikes demanding the return of the Kurdistan Region’s Peshmerga.
Many Kurdish families have left the city due to the gaps in security.
ISIS first swept across Iraq in 2014, capturing cities across northern and central Iraq including Mosul, Iraq's second largest city and the capital of Nineveh province. At the height of its power, ISIS controlled an area equivalent in size to the United Kingdom. During their occupation of Iraq and Syria, ISIS subjected as many ten million people to an extreme and violent interpretation of Islam.
Although Baghdad declared the territorial defeat of the group in Iraq in December 2017, its remnants have since reverted to insurgency tactics; ambushing security forces, kidnapping and executing suspected informants, and extorting money from vulnerable rural populations.
Translation by Zhelwan Z. Wali
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