ISIS video boasts of resurgence with attacks and executions

ISIS has released a new propaganda video in which it boasts of carrying out a series of guerrilla attacks in northern Iraq.

Lance Corporal Brodie Gillon was killed in a rocket attack in Iraq last week. Picture Facebook

Islamic State has released a new propaganda video in which it boasts of carrying out a series of guerrilla attacks in northern Iraq and killing dozens of civilians and security forces.

The 30-minute video includes several terrorist attacks in the northern Iraqi province of Kirkuk, including a mortar strike on an amateur football match and the beheading of captured Iraqi soldiers.

ISIS militants claim that they remain a serious threat in Iraq and are shown terrorising several towns, despite continuing operations against them by a US-led military coalition and the Iraqi army.

The video comes after a grim week for the coalition forces in Iraq during which two US marine commandos were killed in a gunfight last Sunday and a British soldier and two more Americans died in a rocket attack on a base near Baghdad.

“America thinks that victory is killing one or more leaders … or losing control of a city or land. No, defeat is the loss of the will to fight,” the latest video’s narrator states. “Your armies do not scare us.”

ISIS has warned its supporters to avoid Europe over fears that they may catch coronavirus. In the latest issue of its al-Naba newsletter the group, which has incited attacks on European cities, it urges readers to “stay away from the land of the epidemic”.

Despite a worldwide crackdown on jihadi propaganda channels, the video was released by an ISIS account on Hoop, an encrypted messaging app, on Friday night. It is dominated by images of ISIS guerrilla attacks around Kirkuk, against members of the Iranian-backed Popular Mobilisation Forces paramilitary group as well as the Iraqi police, and includes several summary killings of captured Iraqi servicemen.

The video also includes a brutal attack on civilians playing football in a village near Daqouq, southern Kirkuk, which took place last August. At least six people were killed and several others wounded. In an apparent attempt to force local Arab and Kurdish villagers to submit ISIS, militants are also shown setting farmers’ crop fields ablaze.

US President Donald Trump and others have proclaimed that ISIS was “100 per cent defeated” with the loss of its former territory in 2017 and the killing of its founder, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in October last year. But up to 15,000 fighters are thought to have gone into hiding in areas of northern Iraq as their self-styled caliphate collapsed.

About 5200 US and hundreds of British troops have been based in Iraq since 2014, largely to assist and train local soldiers but also carrying out patrols and raids against the remnants of ISIS. But its sleeper cells have emerged in recent months to carry out hit-and-run attacks against Iraqi security forces and rival Islamic militias, raising fears that it could stage a resurgence if coalition forces pull out of the country.

The coalition was said to be reviewing its operations in Iraq last week after at least five deaths, including Lance Corporal Brodie Gillon, a British reservist who died in a rocket attack on Wednesday, which was blamed on rival Shia-dominated militias.

The US air force responded to the attack on Camp Taji, near Baghdad, with retaliatory airstrikes on what it said were weapons stores of the Popular Mobilisation Forces, which is opposed to ISIS. But on Sunday the same base was hit by another rocket attack, injuring more American and Iraqi servicemen.

Colonel Myles Caggins, a US spokesman for the coalition, declined to comment on the video, but said: “We continue to support our Iraqi security force partners in their mission to defeat Islamic State remnants.”

The Times