Iraq will not obey Islamic State demand to release prisoners: PM Spokesperson

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The spokesperson for the Prime Minister of Iraq on Monday said the government would not yield to the demands of the Islamic State (IS) who have called for the release of Sunni female prisoners detained as part of operations to clear the country from the extremist group.

“The Iraqi government will use the law against criminals and will not capitulate to terrorist’s demands,” the Iraqi Prime Minister’s spokesperson, Saad al-Hadithi, told al-Mada newspaper.

The militants made the demands in a video where they threatened to slay six men, who identified themselves as Iraqi police officers and militiamen, if the authorities failed to comply.

The extremists published the footage recently in which they gave a three-day deadline to Baghdad before executing the six men, the Associated Press reported on Saturday. The IS video comes a week after they had kidnapped 17 members of Iraq’s Iran-backed Hashd al-Shaabi militia.

Hadithi stated they would not be “responding to the letters” the “terrorists” have released, adding that the group’s demands “have no value.”

The deadline is nearing and people, who have identified some of the captives in the video as relatives, called on the government to comply with the IS demands.

Brigadier-General Yahya Rasool, a spokesperson for the Iraqi army’s Joint Operations Command (JOC), said he has seen the IS video and noted they are working on finding the location of the hostages.

The Iraqi government, even with the operations it launches against the extremist group, has been unsuccessful in ending the small-scale guerilla-style tactics by sleeper cells remaining in Iraq after the country’s “final victory” proclamation at the end of last year.

The deterioration is most apparent in the territories contested between the Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government.

Erbil blames the Iraqi security forces’ ouster of the Kurdish Peshmerga from the disputed areas, an operation in which the Iran-backed Hashd al-Shaabi partook, as the reason for the failing security situation.

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany