ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Remnants of the Islamic State group (ISIS) in the disputed territory of Makhmour ambushed a group of Kurdish civilians on Saturday, taking one of them hostage, a top Peshmerga commander confirms.
Sirwan Barzani, commander of the Peshmerga forces on the Gwer and Makhmour fronts, said the group of civilians had gone to the Ali Rash plains in Qaraj to search for desert truffles when they were encircled by suspected ISIS militants.
“One of them named Bazhdar Mohammed has been captured and his fate remains unknown,” Barzani said.
The Peshmerga commander urged locals to stay clear of areas unsecured by the Peshmerga or Iraqi armed forces.
“There are not Peshmerga forces there as its security has been handed to Iraqi forces,” Barzani said. “But ISIS maintains a presence in the area due to the security vacuum.”
“We have warned civilians of the danger of the area multiple times,” he added.
Since January there has been a spate of ISIS kidnappings and murders in similar secluded spots, particularly in the isolated desert reaches of Anbar province. The killings led the federal government to outlaw the lucrative search for mushrooms in several areas.
ISIS militants seized Makhmour and surrounding villages in 2014 before they were quickly routed in a combined operation led by the Peshmerga, Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) guerillas, and Coalition forces.
Although the jihadist group was declared defeated in Iraq in December 2017, its remnants have retreated into Iraq’s deserts and mountains, where they have resumed earlier hit-and-run tactics of kidnap, ambush, bombing, and execution, aided by highly sophisticated sleeper cells in the cities and hinterland.
In the aftermath of the Kurdistan independence referendum of September 2017, Iraqi forces launched an offensive against Peshmerga forces in the oil-rich province of Kirkuk and other areas considered disputed between Erbil and Baghdad.
In Makhmour, a combined force of Iraqi Army troops and Hashd al-Shaabi attacked the Peshmerga and Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), forcing them out of the town and into the mountains.
The Peshmerga’s carefully cultivated human intelligence network in Makhmour collapsed. The predominantly Shiite forces which took their place failed to imitate its success.
Makhmour falls on the fault line between Peshmerga positions and Iraqi forces. The ungoverned spaces left between them offer insurgents fertile ground to regroup.
The Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR), the US-led anti-ISIS Coalition, launched an operation last summer against ISIS remnants around Makhmour. With rare cooperation between Iraqi and Peshmerga forces, the threat appeared to be contained.
“It is likely that Daesh is attempting to refit, reorganize and recruit in the vicinity of Makhmour,” US Army spokesman Col James Rawlinson recently told Rudaw, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS.
“Daesh wants to destabilize the area. The Coalition’s goal is to enable local security forces to contain and defeat threats and raise awareness of the deceptive nature of Daesh ideology to empower vulnerable populations to reject it.”
“The past confirms Daesh will seize any opportunity to exploit any security gap they can,” Rawlinson added.