Iraq’s military says security forces destroyed six suspected ISIS hideouts in Kirkuk during an air operation carried out after field work identified the locations in the Zghitun Valley area.
The announcement, reported by Iraqi News, said the operation began early on Monday and involved an airborne group of Special Forces working with the country’s Joint Operations Command. According to the account, the hideouts were struck in precise airstrikes after ground teams confirmed the sites. The military described the action as part of an ongoing campaign to pursue remaining ISIS cells in northern Iraq.
The report said the destroyed sites were in the Zghitun Valley area of Kirkuk, a province that has remained a focus for Iraqi counterterrorism operations even after the territorial defeat of ISIS in 2017. The operation reflects the continuing security challenge posed by small, dispersed militant remnants that Iraq says it is still hunting across the country.
The article also noted that the Kurdistan Region Security Agency, known as Asayish, had earlier announced the arrest of two suspected ISIS militants in separate operations coordinated with Iraq’s Counter-Terrorism Service in Sulaymaniyah province. That earlier detention, reported in the same item, suggests the current counter-ISIS effort remains coordinated across multiple Iraqi security bodies and across different parts of the north.
Iraq’s campaign against ISIS has continued long after the group lost control of large territories it seized in 2014. The news report reminded readers that the extremist group once overran major areas in Iraq and Syria and caused the displacement of more than five million Iraqis from Nineveh, Salah al-Din, parts of Kirkuk, Diyala and Anbar. Even after Baghdad declared the country free of ISIS in late 2017, the government has continued to conduct security operations against remaining militants and hideouts.
The latest statement places Kirkuk back in the centre of that effort. The province has often been a flashpoint because of its geography, its mixed security environment and its importance to both Iraqi and regional politics. But the military’s statement in this case focused tightly on the operational result: six suspected hideouts identified, then destroyed in a rapid strike.
No independent casualty figures or detailed damage assessments were included in the supplied report. The article does not indicate whether the sites were occupied at the time of the strikes, and it does not identify any named militants or commanders connected to the hideouts. On the evidence supplied, the central fact is limited to the military’s claim that it located and eliminated six suspected ISIS positions in Kirkuk as part of an air operation coordinated with security forces on the ground.
