Drone strike kills IS rocket expert
BAGHDAD, April 3, (Agencies): The antiIslamic State coalition conducting airstrikes in Iraq and Syria has killed the IS militant believed responsible for an attack on US troops in northern Iraq last month that left a Marine dead, it said on Sunday.
Militant Jasim Khadijah, a former Iraqi officer not considered a high-value target, was killed by a drone strike overnight in northern Iraq, coalition spokesman US Army Col Steve Warren told reporters in Baghdad.
“We have information (that) he was a rocket expert, he controlled these attacks,” said Warren, referring to the shelling of a base used by US troops near the town of Makhmour, located between Mosul and Kirkuk.
That attack killed Marine Staff Sergeant Louis Cardin and wounded eight others, all part of a company-sized detachment of less than 200 troops. They provide force protection fire to Iraqi army troops, who are making slow progress in a campaign to clear areas around Mosul, an IS stronghold.
Cardin’s was the second combat death of an American service member in Iraq since the start of the campaign to fight the militant group in 2014.
Warren said five other Islamic State fighters were killed in the air strike.
Iraqi officials Sunday denied reports that security forces freed prisoners from an Islamic State group jail in the country’s west, but some said civilians had been evacuated from the area.
Officials from Iraq’s Anbar province said the previous day that security forces discovered a large underground IS prison in the town of Heet, which they are battling to retake from the jihadists, and freed people held inside.
Major General Ali Ibrahim Daboun, the army commander responsible for the area, said that no prison was found, but that civilians had
been “evacuated” from Heet.
Raja Barakat, a member of the Anbar province security committee, gave a similar account.
And Malallah al-Obeidi, a local Anbar official, said that while initial information indicated that security forces freed prisoners, they turned out to be families who were evacuated.
IS seized large parts of Iraq in 2014, but security forces have since regained significant ground from the jihadists.
As ground forces push west across Iraq in the fight against the Islamic State group, civilians are increasingly caught in the crossfire.
Iraq’s elite counterterrorism forces say an estimated 20,000 civilians are trapped in the small western town of Hit, where Iraqi forces have recently relaunched an offensive aimed at cutting critical IS supply lines to neighboring Syria. The civilians, Iraqi commanders and US-led coalition officials say, are slowing operations, making it more difficult to use airstrikes to clear terrain ahead of ground troops.
A single white flag flies above Mursid Nigris’s house on the edge of a palm grove on the western outskirts of Hit, which lies in Anbar province, 85 miles (140 kms) west of the Iraqi capital. Behind his home, black clouds of smoke rise from the town’s center. Counterterrorism forces pushed IS out of this largely agricultural neighborhood on the outskirts of Hit Thursday, but have made little progress since.
Iraqi forces relaunched the operation to take Hit early Thursday morning under cover of coalition airstrikes. The town lies along a supply line linking the extremist group’s fighters in Iraq to those in neighboring Syria. Iraqi commanders say retaking the town will be a key step to link up government forces in Iraq’s west and north in preparation for an eventual push on Mosul.
The original push was delayed by political instability in the capital, Baghdad. When anti-government protests escalated last month, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi pulled some military units from Anbar to Baghdad.
After parts of Ramadi fell to Iraqi forces in December last year, the government and the US-led coalition have tried to build on those gains, moving up the Euphrates river valley and clearing IS from villages as they went.