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Afraid of becoming targets, Islamic State’s Mosul vigilantes remove logos from vehicles

 Afraid of becoming targets, Islamic State’s Mosul vigilantes remove logos from vehicles

A member of the Islamic State’s Hisbah (vigilantism) service boarding a vehicle bearing the squad’s logo.

A member of the Islamic State’s Hisbah (vigilantism) service boarding a vehicle bearing the squad’s logo.
Nineveh (IraqiNews.com) Islamic State vigilantes in the western side of Mosul are obscuring any signs identifying them, fearing that they might make them obvious targets for security forces.

A local source in Nineveh told Alsumaria News on Tuesday that members of the extremist group’s Hisbah (vigilantism) bodies began to remove the service’s logos from their vehicles, fearing that they could make them easy targets for security forces-guided drones that have killed many members recently.

Hisbah committees are Islamic State’s religious law enforcement arm, which arrests violators of the group’s rules and carries out sentences issued against them.

IS militants have occupied Mosul since they emerged in 2014 to proclaim an “Islamic Caliphate” in Iraq. A three-month-old military campaign by Iraqi joint government forces, backed by troops and advisers from a U.S.-led coalition, has managed to recapture the eastern section of the city, and is preparing to cross the Tigris River, which bisects the city, to recapture the western region, where militants still maintain a majority of districts inhabited by nearly 750.000 civilians.

The extremist group has lost many of its senior leaders and personnel over the past three months, and reports of infighting and division within its ranks have been recurrent.

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