The terrorist organisation Daesh executed on Thursday an official in the “Popular Mobilization Forces” (Shiite government forces) and all members of his family in northern Iraq, according to a security source.

The chief of the local Nineveh police, Mezher Khalaf Al-Bayati, told Anadolu that Daesh gunmen dressed as security forces and had stormed the house of Ali Hussein Al-Hamad, commander of the “Popular Mobilization Forces” in the village of Al-Khuwain (20 km south of Mosul), and executed him, his wife and five children and his father.

Al-Bayati said that “Daesh militants used firearms with silencers in their terrorist operation, and then fled.” He pointed out that a joint force of the army and police arrived at the location of the accident and the victims’ bodies were transferred to the Department of Forensic Medicine in Mosul.

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Another security force has also begun searching, prosecuting and arresting criminals.

Over the past months, the Islamic state has stepped up attacks that targeted mostly security forces in the north of the country.

In return, Iraqi forces are conducting ongoing search campaigns in those areas in search of cells of the Islamic state. Three years later and with the support of the US-led coalition, Iraq announced last December that its entire territory had been restored from the grip of Daesh, which controlled a third of the country.

Daesh still maintains sleeper cells spread throughout the country, and gradually began to revert to its old style of guerrilla attacks that it used to follow before 2014.