Gunmen kill 4 civilians south of Iraq’s Mosul

By Serhad Shaker

BAGHDAD (AA) - Three members of the same family were killed -- along with a young girl -- when gunmen attacked a civilian vehicle south of the city of Mosul, an Iraqi security source said Wednesday.

"Unidentified gunmen with Kalashnikov rifles attacked a civilian vehicle that had been carrying three brothers working for the Al-Alil cement factory some 30 kilometers south of Mosul," Police Lieutenant Iyad Hussein al-Asali told Anadolu Agency.

"The attack left the three brothers dead, along with a girl who had been with them at the time," he said.

Al-Asali suggested the gunmen could be remnants of the Daesh terrorist group, which was driven from Mosul earlier this year after the city fell to the Iraqi army following a nine-month siege.

According to eyewitnesses, the attackers later fled into a wooded area on the shores of the Tigris River, which flows through the city.

Despite the Iraqi government’s announcement this summer that the Daesh presence had been entirely extirpated from Mosul, some believe the terrorist group maintains sleeper cells in parts of Nineveh province, of which Mosul is regional capital.

In late August, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared that Mosul had been “entirely liberated” from the terrorist group, which overran much of northern and western Iraq -- including large swathes of Nineveh -- in mid-2014.