Militias claim killing 2 Daesh commanders

ARBIL: Iraq’s militias said on Wednesday that they had killed two Daesh commanders who ordered an attack last week on Us-backed Syrian Kurdish forces along the Iraq-syria border.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said around 70 Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) ighters were killed in the assault, which Daesh launched under cover of a sandstorm using suicide bombers and female militants. The SDF says it lost 14 ighters.

Iraq’s Shiite paramilitaries, also known as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), said in a statement on Wednesday they had killed two Daesh commanders in the border area who were responsible for the attack.

Ahmed Nasrallah, a PMF operations commander for western Anbar, said that the Iraqi military had provided information on militant gathering locations, and that a Us-led military coalition ighting against Daesh had not attacked. The coalition could not immediately be reached for comment.

Separately, a court in the Iraqi capital on Wednesday cleared a Swedish woman of allegations that she belonged to the Daesh due to lack of evidence, a judicial source said.

Under Iraq’s anti-terrorism law, courts can sentence to death anyone found guilty of belonging to Daesh, including non-combatants.

Victoria Lazar, a Swede of Serbian origin in her late 20s, was acquitted of the charge “for lack of suficient evidence,” the judicial source said.

But she was sentenced in a separate case to six months in prison for illegally entering Iraq, the source added.