Alwaght- The Iraqi army is carrying out a major operation in al-Anbar Province to clear remnants of ISIS Takfiri terrorist group, which was ejected from all territories it occupied last December.
According to Saturday media reports, the Iraqi army was carrying out an all-out operation covering al-Anbar’s desert areas right up to the province’s border with Saudi Arabia to hunt down any remaining ISIS terrorists.
Mahmood Falahi, the commander of al-Anbar Operations Command, has been quoted as saying that the operation had started earlier in the day.
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared victory over the group on December 9, 2017 after the army and its allies retook the last urban areas in western Iraq from the Takfiri militants. Since then, the army has been clearing remnants of ISIS terror cells in Anbar and in the vicinity of the north-central Iraqi Saladin Province.
Meanwhile, Iraq’s Joint Operations Command said that the forces were conducting an operation based on “accurate intelligence about the presence of a terrorist leader, Karim Afat Ali al-Samirmd, in one of houses in [Anbar’s] al-Baghdadi District to meet with a terrorist cell.”
Elsewhere, Iraqi security forces have arrested ISIS’s top oil chief while he was trying to cross the border into Syria.
The Iraqi forces ambushed the convoy with which the top ISIS terrorist—identified as Abdel-Ghani Zargham ‘Abdel-Sama—was traveling through the town of Masada in Iraq’s northern province of Nineveh. The oil chief of ISIS surrendered after Iraqi security forces surrounded him, according to the military sources.
At the peak of the ISIS grip over Iraq and Syria, the terrorists were heavily relying on oil smuggling to reap revenues. But as Iraqi Forces backed by the volunteer Popular Mobilization Forces began to expel ISIS terrorists from large areas in Iraq and Syria, their oil income also dwindled.
