Warming up before the battle: Iraqi Operation Will of Victory destroys two ISIS nests

Ahmed Sultan

For the second day in a row, the Iraqi Joint Operations Forces continued Operation Will of Victory, which they launched against ISIS cells in the governorates of Nineveh, Anbar and Salah al-Din, which extend to the border between Syria and Iraq.

The al-Jazeera area operations command was able to destroy two nests belonging to the terrorists and detonate two explosive devices during the second day of operations. Meanwhile, the Nineveh operations command killed three terrorists who were riding in a vehicle, and Popular Mobilization Forces seized another car used by terrorist elements in one of the valleys. The troops considered these operations as a quick warm-up to the war against ISIS.

In the same context, Hisham al-Hashemi, an expert on terrorist groups and a security adviser to the Iraqi government, confirmed that 30,000 fighters, including army, air force and international coalition forces, are taking part in Operation Will of Victory.

Hashemi added that the goal of the campaign is to expel ISIS elements from their strongholds in the border areas, and to encourage citizens in those areas to provide information on the hideouts of terrorist elements in order to track and eliminate them.

A number of Iraqi security experts said that Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi, commander-in-chief of the Iraqi army, had decided to start the operation because of information that came to him about the intention of a number of ISIS groups to attack Iraqi areas from Syria.

ISIS recently launched a series of terrorist attacks in the border areas of Syria and Iraq to deliver a message to the world that it is still alive and was not defeated in the Syrian village of Baghuoz in late March.

The leader of the terrorist organization, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, called on individuals to support the tactics of a war of attrition, focusing on lightning strikes and destroying cities, as well as economically depleting the Iraqi army and the Popular Mobilization Forces by burning crops and property.

Since then, elements of the organization in Iraq have launched a number of attacks on Iraqi army and police checkpoints, and detonated explosive devices and car bombs against the regular forces.