SULAIMANI (ESTA) — Two Iraqi soldiers were killed on Tuesday when a suicide bomber blew himself up during a military raid targeting Islamic State (ISIS) militants in north of Baghdad, AFP cited security sources as saying.
An Iraqi interior ministry source told AFP that a trapped militant “detonated his explosives belt; killing a major and another soldier”.
Three others were wounded in the attack, the source said.
The Iraqi source added that a second militant was killed when he also tried to set off a suicide bomb in the army operation in the rural area of Tarmiya.
ISIS overran large swathes of Iraq and neighboring Syria in 2014, declaring a “caliphate”, before Baghdad declared victory in late 2017 after a grinding campaign.
But a low-level militant insurgency has persisted, particularly in rural areas north of Baghdad around the city of Kirkuk and in the eastern provinces of Diyala and Saladin.
On Tuesday, Iraqi military command spokesman Yahya Rassoul said “43 Islamic State elements” had been killed in a recent operation in the northern province of Niniveh, of which the former ISIS bastion Mosul is the capital, according to AFP.
According to a U.N. report last year, some 10,000 ISIS militants remain active in Iraq and Syria.
