By Hemn Baban
ERBIL, Iraq (AA) – At least five more years is needed to dry up Daesh’s sources of funding in war-weary Iraq, according to a senior Kurdish official.
In an interview with Anadolu Agency, Jabbar Yavar, secretary-general of the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs for northern Iraq’s Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), discussed the embattled terrorist group’s future.
Late last year, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared that Daesh’s military presence in the country had been all but eradicated.
Yavar, however, sees this assertion as overly optimistic.
“According to intelligence gleaned by the [U.S.-led] international coalition, Daesh — which captured Mosul, Iraq's second largest city; overran two thirds of the country; and maintained itself financially by selling oil — has been temporarily neutralized,” he said.
“But it will eventually resume its activities under another name,” he added.
“Now it’s reorganizing itself underground, like Al-Qaeda,” the official said. “It has resorted to setting up fake security checkpoints on the highways [which it uses to waylay and kill security forces].”
According to Yavar, the group has sustained “enormous damage” in recent months “and is now in the process of reorganizing itself”.
He went on to note that the frequency of Daesh attacks had recently spiked, especially along the highway linking capital Baghdad to the oil-rich Kirkuk province.
“The fact that Daesh is now kidnapping people for ransom and carrying out more suicide attacks suggests that it has been severely weakened,” Yavar said.
“But such acts still serve to terrorize the public,” he added. “While such attacks may be seen as relatively small in scale, they nevertheless demoralize people.”
– Five years
According to the Kurdish official, intelligence gathered by the U.S.-led coalition — which was cobbled together in 2015 — suggests it will take at least five years to eradicate the group’s sources of funding.
He went on to note that certain parts of Iraq, like the Hamrin Mountain region between Diyala and Saladin and Mosul’s Sahra area, still remain outside the control of Iraq’s central government.
“No part of the country is still under Daesh’s control,” Yavar said. “But in some urban areas, the terrorists still have free rein.”
*Ali Murat Alhas contributed to this story from Ankara
