KIRKUK: Thirteen Iraqi policemen were killed in an attack by the militant Islamic State group against a checkpoint in the country’s north on Sunday, security and medical sources said.

The attack, in the region of Al-Rashad around 65 kilometres south of Kirkuk city, took place just after midnight, a senior Iraqi police officer said.

“Members of the Islamic State organisation targeted a federal police checkpoint,” said the officer.

“Thirteen were killed and three wounded” among the security forces, the officer added. A medical source based in Kirkuk confirmed the toll.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

IS seized swathes of Iraq in a lightning offensive in 2014, before being beaten back by a counter-insurgency campaign supported by a US-led military coalition.

The Iraqi government declared the extremists defeated in late 2017, but they retain sleeper cells which continue to hit security forces with asymmetric attacks. Jihadist cells regularly target the Iraqi army and police in northern Iraq, but this attack was one of the most deadly this year. A July 19 bombing claimed by IS officially killed 30 people in the Al-Woheilat market in Sadr City, a Shia suburb of Baghdad.

International coalition troops in Iraq currently number around 3,500, of which 2,500 are US troops.

But Washington has been drawing down its military presence amid attacks on facilities it uses by Iran-aligned armed groups and has said that from next year the role of US troops will be limited to training and advising their Iraqi counterparts.

Last Sunday, French President Emmanuel Macron visited Iraqi Kurdistan and expressed concern about an IS “resurgence” in both Iraq and Syria

He also said that French soldiers deployed in Iraq as part of the international coalition will remain in the country “no matter what choices the Americans make”.

Arbaeen

Iraq will allow only 40,000 foreigners, 30,000 of them from Iran, to attend the Arbaeen pilgrimage later this month in Karbala due to the pandemic, authorities said on Sunday.

Arbaeen marks the end of the 40-day mourning period for the martyrdom of Imam Hussein in 680 AD.

The annual pilgrimage usually sees millions of worshippers, mostly Iraqis and Iranians, converge on the Karbala on foot.

Some 14 million attended in 2019, according to official figures, a third of them foreigners who came mostly from Iran, the Gulf, Pakistan and Lebanon.

Last year, Baghdad limited the number of foreigners to 1,500 per country because of the risk of Covid-19 infection.

Published in Dawn, September 6th, 2021