Iraqi F-16s hit Hamrin hideouts as officials warn of an ISIS revival they cannot yet quantify

On 12 October the Jerusalem Post reported Iraqi airstrikes and ground operations against remaining ISIS pockets, quoting an Iraqi military statement that “F-16 aircraft carried out two airstrikes targeting a hideout belonging to remnants of Daesh elements in the Nareen area, resulting in its complete destruction.” The same report identifies the surviving pockets as the Hamrin Mountains and areas near Hawija. Four days earlier, Asharq Al-Awsat, bylined Hamza Mustafa from Baghdad, reported that Iraqi officials had warned of an ISIS resurgence after a series of attacks on security forces in rural areas north of Baghdad left personnel dead or wounded, prompting new security measures. On 5–6 October ISIS claimed an attack that killed a policeman near Kirkuk, using machine guns and sniper fire; Iraqi security officials had told Reuters ahead of the American withdrawal that the group retains sleeper cells.

The context is a drawdown now described as complete. US forces finished their departure from Ain al-Asad airbase in Anbar on or about 16–17 January 2026, with the Iraqi army assuming full control, announced by Iraq’s Defence Ministry; CENTCOM told CNN “the handover was factual,” and an Iraqi Defence Ministry source told the Associated Press that all American equipment had been removed. That implemented the 2024 Baghdad–Washington understanding on a coalition departure timetable. In January the Jerusalem Post reported that a US presence survived in the Kurdistan Region, under a plan that envisaged the remainder leaving by end-2026. The Files could not establish the present status of that Erbil presence, and flags it as the central unresolved question on this desk. The House of Commons Library, re-issuing its Iraq primer this week, frames disarming or integrating Iran-backed militias as a central challenge of 2026.

Assessment: “Resurgence” is an official word and should stay in quotation marks. Three incidents in ten days along the old disputed-territories seam is a geographic pattern, not a demonstrated escalation: there is no published baseline incident count here to measure it against, and ACLED and the monthly Iraq tallies have not been checked. Note who benefits from the framing. A government about to fill nine ministries, and a security establishment that has just absorbed the American exit, both gain from an ISIS threat sized large enough to justify budgets and emergency measures. The harder question is the one nobody in Baghdad is answering on the record: whether any US positions remain in Iraq to be defended, or attacked.