ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Kurdish security forces on Friday announced the arrest of a “big terrorist” who played a key role in the 2014 Islamic State (ISIS) takeover of Mosul.
The suspect was identified as Soqrat Khalil Ismail, 37, known by ISIS as Abdullah the Explosive because when he joined the group in 2013 he was responsible for explosives.
“He played a key role in the ISIS invasion of Mosul in June 2014,” the Kurdistan Region Security Council (KRSC) said in a statement announcing his arrest.
“We were a group of 300 people when we attacked Mosul in 2014. Abu Lais was our commander,” he said in a video confession.
He is also accused of assuming several top positions on the ranks of ISIS, including emir.
Ismail remained in Mosul, fighting Iraqi forces who liberated it in 2017. After the territorial defeat of ISIS in Iraq, he went to Syria where he held various security positions, according to the statement.
In 2018, he returned to Mosul with a fake passport to collect five million dollars ISIS had hidden in Mosul. After handing the money over to ISIS leaders in Baghdad, he travelled to Turkey, again using a fake passport.
“After staying in Turkey for a couple months, I could not stay more and wanted to return to Iraq - Kirkuk or Baghdad,” he noted. His friends did not welcome him back to Kirkuk so he returned to Turkey and lived there for five years.
Again, he wanted to leave Turkey and travelled to the Kurdistan Region with a fake passport, where he was arrested.
ISIS seized control of swathes of Iraqi territory during a brazen offensive in 2014 but it was declared territorially defeated in 2017 when its so-called caliphate fell to Iraqi and Kurdish fighters, supported by a US-led international coalition, claiming lands earlier lost to the jihadists.
Despite its territorial defeat, the group has continued to pose a serious security threat through hit-and-run attacks, bombings, and abductions in several provinces, particularly in areas disputed between the Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which stretch across several provinces including Diyala, Salahaddin, and Kirkuk.
The Iraqi government has said that ISIS is no longer a public security threat as the group has been confined. Baghdad is now in talks with the United States to wind down the global mission against the terror group in Iraq.
In its latest report on the anti-ISIS mission released in February, the Pentagon said the terror group has been contained but not eliminated in Iraq: “In Iraq, due to counterterrorism pressure, the ISIS threat was largely contained, though ISIS continued to exploit security gaps between federal Iraq and the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR), and conducted sporadic attacks, mostly in Shia communities.”
