Six members of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) were killed in an ambush by the ISIS terrorist group in northern Iraq, officials said Thursday.
Thirty-one others were wounded when ISIS ambushed a bus carrying the members in an area south of Mosul city.
Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi opened an investigation into the attack, which took place late Wednesday near the town of Makhmour.
An official from the PMF said the bus was en route from Mosul to the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. He blamed the attack on ISIS, which was vanquished in Iraq in late 2017 but has recently stepped up activities.
The wounded were transported to the nearest health-care facility in the nearby town of Qayyarah, in Nineveh Province.
Member of the parliamentary security and defense committee former interior minister Mohammed Salem al-Ghabban told Asharq Al-Awsat that such attacks demonstrate that ISIS has breached security measures.
He demanded that the breaches be properly addressed, highlighting the need for bolstering intelligence efforts, which would “greatly limit such attacks, but not eliminate them.”
“Some of these violations, including this one, are politically-motivated on the local and regional levels,” he added without elaborating.
Former Nineveh governor Atheel al-Nujaifi underlined to Asharq Al-Awsat the need to resolve pending political issues in the Makhmour area and its surroundings in order to prevent ISIS from exploiting them to carry out more attacks in the future.