ISIS small raid in Kurdistan leaves several dead

Washington Times:

A brazen, coordinated daytime attack in the heart of northern Iraq’s Kurdistan region Monday is stoking concerns that the threat posed by the Islamic State has not subsided but is rebuilding its resources in the months after Washington and Baghdad declared the group’s defeat last July.

The strike on government facilities in Irbil, the capital of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, was the group’s highest-profile attack against the city since its blistering military campaign seized territory across Syria and northern Iraq in 2014.

One week after the top U.S. commander in the Middle East insisted that the terrorist group had been contained, three gunmen shot their way into Irbil’s main regional government building.

They continued firing at employees before all three were killed or captured by security forces, according to news reports. One employee was killed and four security force members were injured during the shootout with the militants, who had taken control of the third floor of the governorate building.

“We believe that the attackers are from Islamic State because of the tactics they used in breaking into the building from the main gate,” a security official told the Reuters news agency. At press time, Islamic State had not officially claimed responsibility for the attack.
...
U.S. military officials characterized a burst of Islamic State operations in sparsely populated Iraqi provinces as the last desperate operations of a movement that once sought to establish a permanent Islamist “caliphate” in the heart of the Middle East.

“We’ve always acknowledged that the [Islamic State] networks will go to ground. They will continue to return to some of their terrorist roots. They will continue to try to exert influence and re-exert their networks” after the loss last July of the terrorist group’s de facto Iraqi capital of Mosul — 50 miles west of Irbil, Gen. Joseph Votel, U.S. Central Command chief, said last week.
...

From a military standpoint, the raid looks pretty impotent and is nothing like the ISIS of old.  It never had the potential of taking over more than a few rooms in an office.  Even their efforts at mass murder were largely unsuccessful.