ISIS attack kills four in Iraq's Salahuddin; mortars found south of Baghdad
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) - The Iraqi military announced that Islamic State militants killed four civilians in an attack on Saturday morning in the Iraqi province of Salahuddin, one day after troops confiscated a cache of mortars south of Baghdad.
The Ministry of Defense said that the deadly attack occurred in the district of Shirqat, but gave no further details.
Regarding the discovery of the mortars, a statement published on the ministry's official social media page read, "The intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance brigade of the 17th Infantry Division, after receiving intelligence information, found a large pile of equipment in the al-'Elimiyah area."
It continued, describing the cache as containing "a 120-mm mortar shell, 34 mortar shells and a 130-mm mortar."
In another statement released on Friday, the ministry stated that 38 explosive devices were destroyed by a military team in Anbar province, to the west, where "Anbar Operations Command continues its pre-emptive operations in the search and inspection of the remnants of the terrorist gangs and the pursuit of dormant cells and the return of the displaced families to their areas of residence."
On May 19, the Iraqi Ministry of Displacement and Migration announced that 129 displaced Iraqis have returned to their liberated homes in Anbar over the previous few days.
A car bombing on Thursday in Anbar's al-Qaim district, where the displaced Iraqis returned to, left four causalities, three of them members of local Hashd al-Shaabi militias, also known as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF).
Following the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq in 2014, over six million Iraqis were displaced in the country. Many of them still refuse or are unable to return to their areas of origin, however, due to security concerns and the lack of basic services in those areas.
Iraq declared victory against the self-proclaimed Islamic State in December 2017, but the terror group continues to carry out insurgency attacks, ambushes, and kidnappings in several provinces, including Kirkuk, Nineveh, Anbar, Salahuddin, and Diyala.