BAGHDAD
\nSuspected extremists on motorbikes stormed a village north of Baghdad late Monday and killed eight Iraqi civilians, officials said.
\nThere was no immediate claim for the attack but the village was a focus of resistance to the Daesh group during its lightning advance through swathes of Iraq and neighboring Syria in 2014.
\nIt came a day after Daesh extremists killed nine federal police in an ambush in Kirkuk province further north.
\n\u201cA group of terrorists on motorbikes attacked the village of Albu Bali from three sides,\u201d the mayor of the district center Al-Khalis, Odai Al-Khadran, told Iraq\u2019s official INA news agency. \u201cThe village is inhabited by farmers… dozens of residents mobilized to defend against the terrorist attack,\u201d he said, adding that eight had been killed and three wounded.
\nAn interior ministry official, who asked not to be identified, blamed IS for the attack, recalling that villagers had formed a paramilitary group to defend their land against the jihadists in 2014.
\nThe defense ministry said it had sent a high-ranking delegation to Diyala province \u201cto throw light on the circumstance of the criminal action.\u201d
\nDaesh extremists seized large areas of Iraq and Syria in 2014, declaring a \u201ccaliphate\u201d which they ruled with brutality before their defeat in late 2017 by Iraqi forces backed by a US-led military coalition.
\nIS lost its last Syrian bastion, near the Iraqi border, in 2019.
\nDespite the setbacks, which have left Daesh a shadow of its former self, the group can still call on an underground network of between 6,000 and 10,000 fighters to carry out attacks on both sides of the porous border, a UN report said earlier this year.
\nLast Wednesday a roadside bomb hit a military vehicle killing three Iraqi soldiers in farmland north of Baghdad, the defense ministry said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BAGHDAD Suspected extremists on motorbikes stormed a village north of Baghdad late Monday and killed eight Iraqi civilians, officials said. There was no immediate claim for the attack but the village was a focus of resistance to the Daesh group during its lightning advance through swathes of Iraq and neighboring Syria in 2014. It came […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":302490,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-302441","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n