Nato is deploying 3,500 more troops amid fears that ten thousand ISIS fighters are poised for a fresh wave of terror. The incremental increase in troops come as ISIS fighters are reportedly on stand-by in northern Iraq, after using the pandemic to rebuild their forces, like reported by thesun.ie.

In response, defence ministers agreed to bolster a NATO training mission aimed at strengthening the country’s military. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Thursday the increases would be “incremental”. “The size of our mission will increase from 500 personnel to around 4,000,” he said.

“Training activities will now include more Iraqi security institutions, and areas beyond Baghdad.”

Stoltenberg insisted that the mission was being carried out “at the request of the Iraqi government”. “It is carried out with full respect for Iraq’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” he said.

Meanwhile, “no final decision” had been made on the future of NATO’s Afghanistan mission, as new US President Joe Biden weighs pulling out troops. It comes as the RAF has also been called into action to strike at targets in Iraq.

ISIS once controlled a vast swath of territory across Iraq and Syria, seized in terrifying offensive in 2014, culminating in its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declaring an Islamic Caliphate in a Mosul mosque.

The bloodthirsty jihadis ruled with extreme brutality before a coalition of Kurdish forces backed by western airpower pushed them into their final pocket of territory in Baghouz, Syria in 2018.

But since their apparent defeat, they have been slowly rebuilding, despite the death of Baghdadi at the hands of US special forces.

Now Sirwan Barzani, a commander of the Kurdish Peshmerga forces stationed near the northern city of Erbil, told The Times the terrorists had taken advantage of a lull in operations against them.

They have emerged from hiding among civilians and reformed under a core leadership operating in the mountain regions of the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq, he said.

Barzani, 50, said ISIS was still “a big threat for all of the world” and that the fighters “will keep pushing as they want to become more powerful”.

“When the liberation started for the whole area, they shaved their beards and posed as civilians, but they were waiting for the opportunity and slowly they went back to rejoin them,” he said.

“They reorganised themselves quicker because of the pandemic and because there were less coalition operations. That was something that was good for them but bad for us, of course.”

Meanwhile, a surge in killings at a huge refugee camp in Syria has sparked concerns that it is the “womb” for a new generation of extremists, Sky News reported.

Twenty deaths were reported last month in al Hawl, a camp housing more than 60,000 people in the north east of the country.

This was more than triple the deaths of recent months.

An Iraqi man who was beheaded accounted for one of the murders, a police officer shot with a silenced pistol was another.

Syrian Kurdish forces running the camp believed IS militants punishing enemies and intimidating those who strayed from their extremist line were largely responsible.

The brutal killings came as a warning that the thousands of children in al Hawl risked being radicalised if they stayed there.

The violence also brought with it a renewed call for repatriations to speed up, for the 10,000 foreign-born people living in the camp.

Last year it was revealed sleeper cells had regrouped under new leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Quraishi and were taking advantage of outbreaks of Covid-19 in the region.

ISIS was last year reported to have established control of territory in the desert around 15 miles from the centre of the town of Deir Ezzor – the first land it has held since the end of the Caliphate.

In January, a suspected ISIS suicide bombing killed at least 32 people in a Baghdad market.

The Ministry of Defence said two RAF Typhoons hit ISIS targets near the city of Bayji last week.

They are taking part in supporting Iraqi forces as part of Operation Shader, the UK contribution to the US-led international counter-ISIS operation.

The Peshmerga estimate there around 7000 ISIS fighters but the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT) puts the figure even higher.

UNOCT chief Vladimir Voronkov said that some 10,000 ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria are pursuing a protracted insurgency, posing “a major, long-term and global threat”.

“They are organized in small cells hiding in desert and rural areas and moving across the border between the two countries, waging attacks”, he said.

ISIS activities have been on the rise across the globe, from Africa to the Philippines.

At the end of last year, the jihadis beheaded more than 50 people and chopped up the bodies of the victims in a brutal attack in northern Mozambique, according to reports.

They also claimed Last year, ISIS claimed responsibility for the sickening bombings in Sri Lanka which killed 321 people on Easter Sunday.

The Iraqi counter-terrorism service has captured four terrorists belonging to the Islamic State terrorist organization in the areas of Taji and Al-Fallujah near the capital of Baghdad, a spokesperson for the Iraqi’s army commander-in-chief, said on Thursday.

“Under an order of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, the counter-terrorism service continues targeting cells of the IS terrorist gangs, so it has been able to capture four terrorists in the areas of Taji and Al-Fallujah, with the arrests made possible by accurate intelligence data received,” Yehia Rasool tweeted.

In late 2017, Iraq declared a victory over the Islamic State, but the army, with the support of the US-led coalition and militia units, still conducts offensives against terrorists and sleeper cells that are active in different parts of the country.

Earlier in February, the country’s Federal intelligence and investigation agency said that its units had detained 24 people affiliated with the IS in the western province of Anbar.

NATO defence ministers are set to expand the military alliance’s training mission in Iraq once the coronavirus pandemic eases, senior officials and diplomats said, potentially cementing a broader role for the Atlantic alliance in the Middle East, like reported by usnews.com.

Ministers are set to agree plans on Thursday during a video conference, potentially taking the mission from its current maximum of some 500 troops to around 4,000 or 5,000, four diplomats said.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Monday he expected defence ministers to agree to an expanded mission, with more allied personnel working in more security institutions across Iraq.

“The mission will expand gradually, in response to the situation,” he said.

NATO has had a non-combat, “train-and-advise” mission in Baghdad since October 2018 but plans to expand it were delayed, in part, by COVID-19 and also due to concerns about regional stability after a U.S. drone killed a top Iranian commander in Baghdad on Jan. 3. 2020.

Earlier expansion plans were mainly in response to a demand by then-U.S. President Donald Trump for NATO to do more in the Middle East. This time, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, a former intelligence chief and U.S. ally who took office in May, is eager to have a greater NATO presence in the country at a time of rising insecurity, diplomats said.

A rocket attack on U.S.-led forces in northern Iraq killed a civilian contractor on Monday and injured a U.S. service member, in the deadliest such incident in almost a year.

Paramilitary groups aligned with Iran in Iraq and Yemen have launched attacks against the United States and its Arab allies in recent weeks, including a drone attack on a Saudi airport and a rocket attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

NATO will likely take over some of the training activities carried out by the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State. The allied mission, involving allies including Britain, Turkey and Denmark and led by a Danish commander, is seen as more acceptable to Iraqis than a U.S. training force, diplomats said.

Currently, the NATO mission only trains and advises members of the Iraqi security institutions and forces who are under the direct control of the Iraqi government.

Iraq’ Security Media Cell reported, on Monday, that Iraqi F-16s struck intensively specific targets in the Hemrin Mountains, like reported by shafaq.com.

“Terrorist hideouts were destroyed in two airstrikes launched by Iraqi F16 planes in the Hemrin Mountain, within the Saladin sector.” A statement said.

The Cell said the security forces continue to pursue ISIS remnants in coordination with the Joint Operations Command.

It also stated that the army’s air force launched five air strikes targeting ISIS gang members in Lake Hemrin, without providing any further details.

Like his six predecessors as president, Joe Biden enters office with the challenge posed by Iran’s regime high on his to-do list. Putting partisanship aside, as far as leverage against Tehran is concerned, the incoming administration has inherited a powerful hand from its predecessor, with the Islamic Republic’s economy already under huge pressure due to U.S. sanctions. Moving forward, speculation now centres on when and how Biden should re-engage Tehran, and if any concessions can be obtained beyond the nuclear issue, like reported by time.com.

Yet there can be no turning the clock back to 2015 when the nuclear deal was signed between world powers and the Islamic Republic. Since then, Iran has changed internally, and its place in the region is very different. Key to these changes is the increased power of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the clerical regime’s ideological armed wing which, as our new report for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change shows, has become more influential in shaping and implementing the Islamic Republic’s security, military, and foreign policies, enforcing what we call its “militia doctrine.”

Often seen as part of the Iranian deep state, the Revolutionary Guard is increasingly transitioning to the state itself. IRGC-affiliated candidates are well placed to take the presidency in June and whoever succeeds ageing Ayatollah Khamenei as supreme leader will need the IRGC more than ever to maintain power.

Outside of Iran, the Revolutionary Guard has strengthened its grip throughout the Middle East through its network of militias. Since its inception, the IRGC has nurtured militancy and supported a range of paramilitary groups. Within these, our report reveals that it is the militias that it has manufactured itself that are now the fastest growing and pose the greatest threat to regional stability. A decade on from the 2011 Arab Spring these manufactured militias now cover a landmass stretching from Lebanon through to Yemen.

And contrary to conventional opinion, their purpose is not simply to serve the Iranian state’s defense. The West has tended to see the Revolutionary Guard and its militia network primarily as Iran’s deterrent from external threats. If the U.S. and its allies de-escalate with the Islamic Republic, the thinking goes, the IRGC will scale back its regional activities. Yet its actions and its indoctrination programme make clear this perception is flawed.

In fact, the Revolutionary Guard and the militias it has manufactured reject the very premise of the nation-state, something they regard as a Western construct. Instead, they have been indoctrinated to see the world through the prism of the “Imam and Ummah”—a Shia Islamist ideal of an Islamic state whereby only the 12 divinely ordained Shia imams, the descendants of the Prophet Mohammad, can be the legitimate rulers with absolute authority over Muslim communities (Ummah). Under this worldview, Iran’s supreme leader acts as God’s representative on earth, with a divine mandate over all Muslims worldwide.

Since 1979, both of Iran’s supreme leaders—Khomeini and Khamenei—have interpreted this concept to pursue militancy on the basis of three core ideological objectives: exporting the Islamic Revolution, supporting Islamist and anti-Western movements, and eradicating Israel.

Today, the militias the Revolutionary Guard has manufactured consist of young, radicalised Shia men whose primary objectives are creating a pan-Shia state centred on Ayatollah Khamenei’s leadership. These ‘gold standard’ militias not only receive arms, training and funds from the IRGC, but Tehran has spent a significant amount of time and capital to recruit and radicalize their fighters. Lebanese Hizbullah, for example, is fully aligned with the Islamic Republic’s vision, accepting of its absolute authority over the Shia world, and dedicated to the overthrow of its enemies in the West and in Israel.

The Revolutionary Guard works in collaboration with the Islamic Republic’s soft-power organizations to indoctrinate them with the clerical regime’s extremist Shia Islamist ideology. Our report details how Tehran’s educational, cultural, humanitarian and diplomatic agencies are complicit in this militancy and ensure the long-term survival of the ideas and worldview that underpin it. Among other apparently legitimate bodies, the Imam Khomeini Relief Foundation, Iran’s Red Crescent Society and Al-Mustafa International University all host IRGC-affiliated personnel.

To understand Iran’s regional activity, it is vital to understand the ideological nature of the Revolutionary Guard. Forcing Tehran to scale back its militia activity will require more sophisticated responses than a flexing of sanctions in order to reward or punish the Islamic Republic’s compliance with international accords, not least because as the Guard takes over state institutions, there is a higher chance sanctions relief will enrich its pockets.

As the Biden administration begins the hard work of forging a new U.S. policy towards Iran, it must consider that countering Tehran’s militia network will require a hearts-and-minds counterinsurgency approach. As well as contesting the IRGC’s hard-power militia assets, the Biden administration must work to dismantle the soft-power infrastructure Iran has built to sustain these groups.

The future of the Islamic Republic very much remains in the hands of the Revolutionary Guard. This reality on the Iranian ground cannot be ignored before the West reaches out to Tehran.

The ISIS terrorist group on Monday ambushed a regime convoy in eastern Syria, killing at least 26 fighters, a Britain-based war monitor said according to alarabiya.ne.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the early morning ambush in the province of Deir Ezzor came as the convoy combed the area for extremists.

“Violent clashes between the two sides led to large human losses,” it said, calling the toll from fighting the “largest since the start of the year.”

Last month, ISIS said it was behind a December 30 bus ambush in Deir Ezzor province, which killed at least 37 Syrian soldiers.

ISIS in 2014 overran large parts of Syria and Iraq and proclaimed a cross-border “caliphate” before multiple offensives in the two countries led to its territorial defeat.

The recent killing of Islamic State’s top leader in Iraq should not be seen as a crippling sign for the terror group, which has in recent months received fresh recruits and increased its attacks in the country, says a senior Iraqi Kurdish military official according to voanews.com.

U.S. officials have confirmed that a U.S.-led coalition airstrike eliminated Jabbar Salman Ali Farhan al-Issawi, known as Abu Yasser, last week near the Iraqi province of Kirkuk. Abu Yasser reportedly had been leading the IS insurgency in Iraq since 2017.

Despite Abu Yasser’s death, Sarbast Lazgin, deputy minister of Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces, says the terror group has increased its activities while Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) have yet to come to an effective joint mechanism on how to govern so-called disputed areas. Kirkuk is also considered part of the disputed territories between Baghdad and the KRG.

In a phone interview with VOA, Lazgin said the jihadists are already exploiting a “security vacuum” in those areas.

“I don’t want to say it will have no impact,” he said, referring to Abu Yasser’s death. “But experience has shown groups that can indoctrinate their members to a level where they are willing to blow themselves up, the demise of one person will not change much. It may have a temporary impact, but the group will soon find a new replacement.”

While noting that IS’s current objectives are less ambitious than they were in 2014, Lazgin said the jihadi group recently has shown capabilities to mount more lethal and well-planned attacks.

“They now carry out operations that are larger in scale,” he said. “They now attack military outposts and units.”

Last month, IS claimed responsibility for a twin suicide attack that targeted a busy market in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, killing nearly three dozen civilians and wounding many more. In January, IS also targeted a base for the Iran-backed Shi’ite militias, killing at least 16 fighters including their commander.

New recruits

The Kurdish official said their intelligence indicates more fighters from Arab nationalities have recently joined IS in Iraq, crossing from the country’s nearly 650-kilometer porous border with Syria.

He estimated the current number of the group’s Iraq-based active militants to be at 1,500, but that does not include sleeper cells, which are frequently discovered.

U.S. military officials say the extremist group, also known as Daesh, “remains a serious challenge, but relentless pressure by our security partners in Iraq and Syria is preventing a reemergence of Daesh.”

“Daesh leadership, finances and recruiting are crippled in Iraq,” said Col. Wayne Marotto, spokesman for the global coalition against IS. He did, however say, “Daesh continues to pursue an insurgency with hit-and-run tactics, assassinating, and intimidating local leaders and security forces and extending its influence in rural areas.”

“Daesh is no longer able to sustainably occupy any territory in Iraq and Syria,” he added.

Colin Clarke, director of policy and research at the New York-based Soufan Center, believes IS has the “means to launch a comeback” as it continues to find ways to fund its insurgency.

“While the group isn’t bringing in anywhere near what it did at its peak, it’s also spending far less because it doesn’t have a proto-state to administer,” he told VOA.

Still, IS “has an estimated $100 million in reserves, and continues to use Turkey as a logistical hub,” Clarke said, adding that the group generates revenue from oil smuggling and kidnapping for ransom.

Foothold in disputed areas

Kurdish officials say IS has found a foothold in several areas in northern Iraq that are disputed between the KRG and the central government.

In recent months, KRG and Iraqi military officials have held bilateral meetings on how to jointly provide security for the disputed territories.

Peshmerga official Lazgin said those meetings had led to “significant progress” on establishing joint planning and operations centers, but he added that in December, his ministry received a letter from Iraq’s ministry of defense, calling for an end to such plans.

“The letter basically told us: let’s rather have only a communication line open and you can be in your own area and we can be in our own area, and that there is no need for the joint operations centers,” he said.

Iraqi military spokesman Yehia Rasool did not respond to VOA’s request for comment about this matter.

This week, the KRG appeared to have taken matters into its own hands after it mobilized troops near Makhmour, a disputed town about 65 kilometers from Irbil, the regional capital.

Some local Iraqi officials have voiced concern over the deployment.

“The regional authorities are trying to extend [their control] to the administrative borders of Kirkuk province and send peshmerga forces to the Debs district areas, where the oil wells of the North Oil Company are located,” ethnic Arab and Turkoman members of the Kirkuk Provincial Council said in a statement Tuesday.

“We categorically reject the return of Peshmerga forces to the administrative boundaries of Kirkuk province,” their statement added.

In response, the KRG said, “There has been no unusual movement against Iraqi forces, and what has happened is because the Daesh terrorist threats have recently increased in Mount Qarachogh and the Makhmour area, and the intelligence confirms that Daesh wants to commit terror acts in these areas.”

The Sinjar agreement

In October 2020, Baghdad and KRG reached a deal to “normalize” the situation in Sinjar, a Yazidi town that fell to IS in 2014 and became the scene for a genocide against the religious minority.

The agreement established that security of the disputed town will be handed over from a militia affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to Iraqi forces. The Turkey-based PKK is designated as a terrorist organization by Washington and Ankara.

The deal was commended by the United Nations, the U.S. and Turkey, hoping that it would help the internally displaced Yazidi families return to their homes in Sinjar.

After initial objections, the PKK appeared to have agreed to the new deal. Local news networks recently showed Iraqi flags replacing the PKK ones raised on buildings in the town, but Kurdish official Lazgin says much of that deal still remains on paper.

“The PKK forces are still in the area and in fact their activities have increased,” he said. “It’s true they lowered their flag in some buildings inside the city of Sinjar, but outside the city and particularly in Mount Sinjar, a 70-kilometer-long range, I can say that 80% of the mountain is under the PKK’s control,” he added.

Lazgin said he doubted that Iraq will be able to fully defeat terrorism unless its main ethnic and religious components find a mutually agreeable political system.

“If Iraq remains indefinitely the way it is, we expect the impact of this group called Daesh to only increase in Iraq. Unfortunately, the root causes that led to the birth of Daesh are still here and that explains why bloodshed and terror will always plague Iraq,” he added.

Syrian state television said Wednesday evening the country’s air defenses responded to “Israeli aggression” in what appears to be an attack on Hezbollah targets in the area, like reported by ynetnews.com.

The alleged attack came hours after Lebanon’s terror group said it had fired an anti-aircraft missile at an IDF drone in Lebanese territory. Israeli military confirmed the missile fire but said the drone was not hit and continued its operation in the country.

The Syrian news agency Sana said the attack took place in Quneitra province in southern Syria close to the Golan Heights, with echoes of explosions heard in the area.

Earlier on Wednesday, two Iranian cargo planes affiliated with the Iranian Air Force and the Revolutionary Guard, landed in Damascus and a few hours later returned to Tehran. In addition, a Syrian Air Force cargo plane made its way from Tehran to Latakia.

About two and a half weeks ago, Syria reported that Israel carried out an attack near the city of Hama in the west of the country.

According to reports, a barrage of missiles was fired from the direction of the city of Tripoli in Lebanon and explosions were heard in the area near the city.

A Syrian military source claimed that most of the missiles were intercepted, but parents and their two children were killed in the attack, while four others were wounded.

Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group terrorists killed 19 Syrian regime personnel and allied militia fighters in the central province of Hama on Wednesday (Feb 3), a Britain-based war monitor said according to straitstimes.com.

“Nineteen regime fighters and allied militia forces were killed in an IS attack, including 11 members of the Baqir Brigade,” a local Iran-backed militia, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, using an alternate acronym for ISIS.

The war monitor said the “surprise attack” on Wednesday morning targeted regime positions in eastern Hama, the site of recent clashes between regime forces and Islamists.

Observatory head Rami Abdul Rahman called it the deadliest ISIS attack this year.

ISIS overran large parts of Syria and Iraq and proclaimed a cross-border “caliphate” in 2014, before multiple offensives in the two countries led to its territorial defeat.

The group lost its last scrap of territory in Syria in March 2019, but in recent months, it has ramped up attacks against regime forces, especially in the east of the country bordering Iraq.

In December last year, ISIS killed nearly 40 Syrian troops in an ambush of a bus carrying soldiers travelling home for the holidays.

According to the Observatory, ISIS attacks have killed more than 1,200 regime fighters and allied militia forces since March 2019.

The war in Syria has killed more than 387,000 people since it started in 2011, the Observatory says.

Two ISIS terror cells found hiding in caves have been destroyed by British RAF fighter jets using laser-guided bombs in Iraq, like reported by dailymail.co.uk.

A pair of RAF Typhoon FGR4s conducted simultaneous attacks using two Paveway IV guided bombs to kill the terrorists based in two caves near Bayji, a city 130 miles north of Baghdad.

The attack comes just days after Iraq said an airstrike had killed an ISIS commander in Iraq who had claimed to be the leader of the terror group in the country.

A coalition surveillance aircraft had located a number of ISIS fighters on January 24 and the two fighter jets were tasked to strike them, according to a statement by the Ministry of Defence.

The pilots checked the area around the caves, which were a mile and a half apart, for any signs of civilians who could have been at risk. They then simultaneously launched two laser-guided bombs against each group.

‘All four of the bombs struck the targets accurately and the strike was assessed to have been a success in eliminating the terrorist threat’, the MoD said. They did not reveal how many casualties there were.

The airstrike is part of an effort to prevent any resurgence of ISIS in Iraq by supporting the Iraqi security forces.

The jihadists were driven out of their last remaining territory in Iraq more than three years ago but still pose a threat in the country, as demonstrated by an attack in Baghdad two weeks ago which killed 32 people and for which ISIS claimed responsibility.

The recent strike is the first British attack on ISIS targets since October 6 last year whereby a coalition airstrike killed ISIS terrorists who had attacked Iraqi security forces in the desert of Anbar province, west of Baghdad.

Last year in April, two British RAF Typhoon jets bombed six caves being used as a base for ISIS militants near Bayji.

The two fighter jets used Paveway IV guided bombs – the same used in the recent January 24 attack – to hit the the cave entrances during the night-time strike.

In a further setback for the terror group, Iraq said on Thursday ISIS commander Abu Yaser al-Issawi – who had declared himself the cell’s ‘deputy caliph’ – had been killed in a military strike.

Iraq’s Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi said it was ‘intelligence-led operation’.

Paying tribute to Iraq’s ‘heroic armed forces’, Kadhimi said: ‘I gave my word to pursue [ISIS] terrorists, we gave them a thundering response’.

Little is known about the Iraqi figure whose death was announced on Thursday, but ISIS figures have often been known to use noms de guerre to mask their true identities.

A similarly-named ‘Abu Yasser al-Ithawi’ was listed in a 2018 report as an ISIS operations commander in Iraq and a member of the terror group’s ‘delegated committee’.

The former ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Bahgdadi, also operated in Iraq and made his only known public appearance there when he declared the ‘caliphate’ in 2014.

He was killed in a US operation in Syria in late 2019, blowing himself up with a suicide vest after special forces pursued him into a dead-end tunnel.

The US government has identified Baghdadi’s successor as Amir Muhammad Sa’id Abdal-Rahman al-Mawla, previously affiliated to al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Washington says he ‘helped drive and justify the abduction, slaughter, and trafficking of the Yazidi religious minority in northwest Iraq’.

ISIS fighters had been driven from all the territory they held in Iraq by 2017 and lost their last patch of land in Syria in 2019.

But they have continued to wage a low-level insurgency against Iraqi forces and attack officials, mainly in northern areas.

Two weeks ago, they said they were behind an attack that killed at least 32 people in a crowded Baghdad market, Iraq’s first big suicide bombing for three years.

ISIS used a communications channel on Telegram to claim that two of their operatives had blown themselves up in Tayaran Square in the centre of Baghdad on January 21.

Health authorities said at least 110 people had been wounded after the attack, which left pools of blood and discarded clothes strewn over parts of the city.

One street vendor who witnessed the attack said a bomber had fallen to the ground and feigned a stomach problem before detonating his weapon.

Suicide attacks were once a regular occurrence in the Iraqi capital but normal life has largely returned, the pandemic aside, since ISIS fighters were driven away.

However, Iraq is now struggling through its worst economic crisis in years, deepened by last year’s collapse of oil prices and the coronavirus pandemic.

The January 21 attack took place in the same market that was struck in the last big atrocity, in January 2018, when at least 27 people were killed.

Such suicide attacks against civilians were also a near-daily tactic of insurgents during the US occupation of Iraq after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

They were later employed by Islamic State, whose fighters swept across a third of the country at their peak in 2014.