Iraqi authorities on Thursday arrested four people suspected of having carried out a terrorist attack in Mosul following the city’s recapture last year from the ISIS terrorist group.

“Four wanted individuals were arrested and charged with blowing up a market in Mosul’s eastern Al-Muthanna district in June of last year, causing deaths and injuries,” Captain Jawad Mohamed al-Makhzoumi of the National Security Service (NSS) in Nineveh province (of which Mosul is regional capital) said.

“Initial confessions made by the defendants indicate that they are in fact the culprits and that they are Daesh members,” he added.

In a related development Thursday, Iraqi authorities found the dead body of an unidentified individual in Mosul’s western Mansour district.

“The body is that of a man who sustained gunshot wounds to his head, chest and abdomen,” NSS Captain Mustafa Khalil Ibrahimi said, noting that the body also appeared to bear signs of torture.

While no group has claimed responsibility for the man’s abduction, the Iraqi authorities typically blame such acts of violence on ISIS.

Late last year, officials in Baghdad declared that ISIS's military presence in Iraq had been all but destroyed.

It appears the notorious terrorist group, however, still maintains “sleeper cells” in several parts of the country, including the northern Nineveh province.

This article has been adapted from its original source. </s> JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — An Indonesian court sentenced an Islamic militant to nine years in prison on Monday for masterminding a double suicide bombing last year that targeted police at a bus terminal in Jakarta.

Kiki Muhammad Iqbal, 38, was among six suspected militants who were arrested days after the attack, in which two bombers blew themselves up, killing three policemen and themselves. The attack also wounded 12 people, both police and civilians.

The suspects were believed to be members of Jemaah Anshorut Daulah, a network of about two dozen Indonesian extremist groups that formed in 2015 and pledges allegiance to Islamic State group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

The network, which the United States has designated a terrorist grouping, has been implicated in a number of attacks in Indonesia over the past year.

A panel of three judges at North Jakarta District Court ruled that Iqbal had organized and incited others to launch the suicide attacks through his jihadist sermons at a mosque in Bandung, the capital of West Java province. The bombers and other suspects attended the mosque.

"The defendant has legally and convincingly been proven guilty of organizing and inciting others to commit acts of terrorism," said presiding Judge Purwanto, who uses one name.

The May 24 attack last year was the deadliest in Jakarta since January 2016, when a suicide and gun strike in the central business district killed four civilians and four assailants.

In a separate trial in the same court, a panel of three judges sentenced another militant, Muslih Afifi Afandi, to seven years in jail for harboring other suspects and hiding information about the attacks from authorities.

Officials in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation, have carried out a sustained crackdown on militants since the 2002 bombings by al-Qaida-affiliated radicals that killed 202 people in Bali. In recent years the country has faced a new threat as the rise of the Islamic State group in the Middle East has breathed new life into local militant networks. </s> Baghdad (IraqiNews.com) Six Islamic State members, including a woman, were arrested in operations in Nineveh province, the Iraqi Interior Ministry announced on Friday.

In a press release, the ministry said troops in Nineveh “arrested six Islamic State members, including a woman. All are wanted for by courts for trials.”

“Two of them were arrested in Abu Maria village in Tal Afar, while the rest were in several areas across Mosul,” the ministry added.

Last week, news reports quoted sources as saying that over 20 IS members were arrested in several security operations carried out in west of Mosul.

Thousands of Islamic State militants as well as Iraqi civilians were killed since the government campaign, backed by paramilitary troops and the coalition was launched in October 2016 to fight the militant group, which declared a self-styled “caliphate” from Mosul in June 2014.

Islamic State continues to launch sporadic attacks across Iraq against security troops. Security reports indicate that the militant group still poses threat against stability in the country.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi announced, in December, full liberation of Iraqi lands, declaring end of war against IS members. The war against IS has displaced at least five million people. </s> Mosul (IraqiNews.com) Iraqi police forces arrested six Islamic State militants in the group’s former bastion, Mosul, a police official was quoted saying on Thursday.

Spokesperson of the Interior Ministry, Saad Maan, said in a statement that the six were arrested in al-Wahda neighborhood in eastern Mosul after a raid of searches, adding that those arrested had arrest warrants issued for them based on the anti-terrorism law.

Iraq declared victory over Islamic State militants in December 2017, ending a three-year military campaign against the group to retake areas they had occupied to proclaim a self-styled “caliphate”.

But even after Iraq declared that the militants lost their territorial influence, the group seems to continue to represent a security concern, launching several attacks against security and civilians and causing several death. </s> Nineveh (IraqiNews.com) Security services have arrested more than twenty Islamic State members in several operations in Nineveh province, while weapons and explosives were seized in their possession, security sources said on Saturday.

Speaking to BasNews website, Cap. Amir Watheq, from Nineveh police, said, “security troops arrested eight Islamic State members, possessing hand grenades in Makhmur, southeast of Mosul.”

“Troops cordoned off the area, where the militants were hiding and invaded their houses, then took them to Nineveh Operations Command headquarters for investigations.”

All hand grenades, in their possession, were confiscated.

In related news, Col. Khodier Saleh, of the Federal Police, said, “security services arrested an IS cell, composed of 15 members, which was planning to to attack troops deployed in western Mosul.”

“The cell members, were possessing weapons. All were arrested inside a tunnel,” he added.

Thousands of Islamic State militants as well as Iraqi civilians were killed since the government campaign, backed by paramilitary troops and the coalition was launched in October 2016 to fight the militant group, which declared a self-styled “caliphate” from Mosul in June 2014.

Islamic State continues to launch sporadic attacks across Iraq against security troops. Security reports indicate that the militant group still poses threat against stability in the country.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi announced, in December, full liberation of Iraqi lands, declaring end of war against IS members. </s> (Hatha al-Youm | Iraq News )- ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – A lawmaker from Nineveh province on Monday called on Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi to increase security through local forces in areas once under the control of the self-proclaimed Islamic State a day following a blast in the large town of Rabia, on the Syrian border.Five people were killed and eight others injured in the explosion, which was carried out by a small car parked near a vegetable market, security sources said. No one has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, but security forces have laid the blame on the Islamic State.This attack came a day after fires swept through vast areas of wheat fields, like many other parts of the country, from the outskirts of the Kurdish city of Khanaqin in Diyala province to the east of Iraq to Anbar province in the west. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for many of the fires.Read More: Thousands of acres of agricultural crops destroyed in fires over past two weeks in IraqIn a statement, Kurdish MP Sherwan al-Dupardani called on Abdul-Mahdi and the Nineveh’s security chief to “strengthen the presence of security forces in liberated areas, especially [with] local police and empower the people of these areas to contribute to” security.He described the incident in Rabia as a “cowardly terrorist attack,” demanding concerted “intelligence efforts to pursue [ISIS] sleeper cells that are trying to create instability, especially in the border areas of Nineveh province and prevent the infiltration of terrorists across the border.”Read More: ISIS bombing kills 5, injures 10 who were extinguishing fire in disputed KirkukAlthough Iraq announced the military defeat of the Islamic State in December 2017, the terrorist group continues to carry out insurgency-style attacks in formerly liberated areas, like Mosul, as well as places it never controlled, like the nation’s capital of Baghdad.In March, the terrorist group’s territorial collapse came at the hands of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Syria. However, their sleeper agents continue to operate similarly and cause instability, crossing between Iraq and Syria due to weak border security.Editing by Karzan Sulaivany </s> JAKARTA - A Muslim preacher was on Monday (April 9) sentenced to nine years in jail by an Indonesian court for inciting the suicide bombing in East Jakarta in May last year that killed three policemen.

Kiki Muhammad Iqbal, 38, had been charged with inciting others to commit an act of terrorism by delivering a sermon in a Bandung mosque on May 19, 2017, on how "mati syahid" - meaning "to die as a martyr" - is the ultimate goal of every good Muslim.

The message from former terrorist bomb-maker Kiki was allegedly directed at Ahmad Sukri and Ikhwan Nur Salam, the two men who died while mounting a suicide bomb attack near a bus station in Jakarta on May 24, 2017.

"The defendant has validly and convincingly been proven guilty of planning and inciting others to commit an act of terror," presiding judge Purwanto told the courtroom in North Jakarta District Court on Monday.

After the verdict was read out, Kiki told reporters outside the courtroom: "It's an unfair and tyrannical verdict."

Kiki's lawyer Kamsi said he will notify the court in a week's time whether his client intends to appeal against the verdict.

Inciting others to commit an act of terrorism is a crime in Indonesia punishable by death or life imprisonment.

Besides killing three policemen, the attack by the two men at the Transjakarta bus shelter in Kampung Melayu left 11 others injured, including a 17-year-old driver and 19-year-old student.

Kiki was arrested on June 5 in Sumedang, a regency located about two hours from Bandung by car, after police established a link between him and the two attackers.

He was a student of radical cleric Aman Abdurrahman, the leader of the Jemaah Ansharut Daulah, an alliance of Indonesian militants who have pledged their allegiance to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terrorist group.

Aman, in an ongoing separate trial, has been accused of inciting others to commit various terror attacks in Indonesia including the attack in Jakarta in January 2016, which left four bystanders dead, in what was the first incident claimed by ISIS in South-east Asia.

In 2010, Kiki was arrested for being a member of a terrorist cell in West Java known as "the Cibiru bomb group" and sentenced to six years in jail for terrorism-related offences a year later. After his recent release, Kiki refused to undergo a deradicalisation programme conducted by the National Counter-terrorism Agency. </s> An Iraqi court has given the death penalty to a man who acted as a legislative judge in Mosul for the Islamic State (IS) when the group was in control of the city, said a judicial spokesman on Thursday.

The defendant, whose name was not specified, was reported to have been in charge of marriage contracts in Mosul and surrounding areas.

"The Nineveh Criminal Court sentenced an Islamic State militant to death,” said Abdul Sattar al-Birqdar, spokesperson for Iraq's Higher Judicial Council, in a statement. “The convict used to work as a judge in the marriage contracts court, within the so-called legislative courts of Islamic State in Mosul.”

One day before, al-Birqdar and another judicial official announced that, since the beginning of the year, over 300 suspects have been handed death sentences for crimes related to IS membership.

The cases, being heard in federal courts in Baghdad and Nineveh provinces, also resulted in several hundred lesser sentences, including life imprisonment.

The rise of executions in the country has led the UN mission in Iraq, the EU, and international human rights groups to criticize Iraq for a lack of transparency in its courts.

"These executions follow rushed trials of ISIS suspects which are riddled with due process violations, including convictions based solely on confessions which are sometimes extracted by torture," said HRW senior Iraq researcher Belkis Wille in a press release on Tuesday.

The death penalty in Iraq was suspended on June 10, 2003, but was reinstated the following year. Critics say that the country's flawed and confession-based criminal justice system in which torture is routinely used to extract confessions is incompatible with so final a sentence as capital punishment.

Iraq's Justice Ministry announced on Monday that it had executed 13 convicted prisoners, 11 of them over charges of terrorism.

Last year, Iraqi forces arrested tens of thousands of those accused of being Islamic State (IS) members and affiliates, most of whom await sentencing. </s> Iraq's military says a car bomb has killed five people and wounded eight in a northwestern village near the Syrian border.

A military statement said the car was parked near a market in the village of Oweinat in Nineveh province.

The area was once held by the Islamic State group that controlled large parts of Iraq and Syria.

Despite its defeat in Iraq in 2017, IS sleeper cells have been blamed for attacks across the country that have killed and wounded scores of people over the past two years.
Counterterror forces in Ninevah arrest and charge four suspected Islamic State members over a fatal bombing at a market in regional capital Mosul last year. Separately, authorities discover an unidentified corpse in Mosul thought to be connected.