ERBIL – The Islamic State (IS) has taken responsibility for a rash of attacks in recent days as part of their “Battle of Revenge for the Two Sheikhs,” announced on April 17 and seen as global in scope.
Multiple attacks this week in
Afghanistan, Syria,
Nigeria,
Libya, Uzbekistan, and other locations have been claimed by the group since the announcement of the campaign, which comes amid Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. In the first three days of the campaign,
42 attacks were reported in nine countries.
A
large number of casualties resulted from at least four attacks on April 21 in Afghanistan, including at a Shiite mosque in the northern city of Mazar al-Sharif near the border with Uzbekistan.
The two sheikhs referred to in the IS campaign are the former leader of the international terrorist organization, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Quraishi, and its former spokesman, Abu Hamza al-Quraishi….
A security official from western Anbar
claimed to Al-Monitor in February that “there are now close to a thousand” IS operating in the deserts of Anbar, Salah al-Din, and Nineveh, and that IS activities in the Anbar desert had been stepped up
after a massive jailbreak in eastern Syria in recent weeks.
On April 15, the regional police forces in Iraq’s westernmost province of Anbar
announced the arrest of Amer Wahib, the brother of the well-known Shakir Wahib.
Shakir Wahib had at one point been considered a possible successor to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The US claims he was killed in his native Anbar region in an airstrike in 2016.
The area where Amer was captured – Qaim, along the border with Syria – is mainly under
the control of armed groups linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards,
who cross the border largely at will.
The
first claimed attack of the ‘Revenge for the Two Sheikhs’ campaign seems to have been in the area of al-Busayrah in eastern Deir al-Zor, an Arab province currently under the control of the US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). IS claimed the attack on April 18….
