ISIS’s al-Naba Claims an Iraqi General and a Nigerian Camp Commander in Issue 570

What did ISIS claim in al-Naba issue 570, and do officials confirm it?

Al-Naba issue 570, the Islamic State’s weekly newspaper dated October 22, 2026, claims an October 14 bomb in Kirkuk’s Wadi Zghaytoun that killed an Iraqi brigadier general and an October 19 ambush in Nigeria’s Yobe State that killed a camp commander. Iraqi and Nigerian accounts confirm both deaths but differ with ISIS on key details.

The Islamic State’s weekly newspaper came out on schedule again on Thursday, October 22, 2026. Issue 570 of al-Naba leads with a claim of “dozens” of Nigerian and Nigerien troops killed in West Africa. Its most specific claim, though, is a bomb in northern Iraq. The group says it killed a brigadier general of the Iraqi army and his aide in Kirkuk province on October 14.

Iraq’s Defense Ministry has confirmed the officer’s death, and his name. It has not confirmed the ISIS version of how he died.

The issue also carries an Amaq News Agency claim, repeated in its West Africa pages, that ISIS fighters killed a Nigerian army camp commander and six soldiers in a roadside ambush in Yobe State on October 19. Nigerian newspapers and AFP reported a deadly ambush near Geidam that day.

Editor’s note: The Islamic State is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. This report does not name or link any ISIS-run domain, channel, bot, wallet or file; sites are identified by outlet or role only. All casualty figures attributed to ISIS, al-Naba or Amaq are the group’s claims.

The Kirkuk Claim: A General in Wadi Zghaytoun

Al-Naba runs the Iraq item on its front page and in full on page five, under a headline that puns on the officer’s first name. “Ahat” is Arabic for “groans,” and the headline reads, “The Rafidites’ groans continue.” “Rafidite” is the group’s slur for Shiites. The full item reads:

Iraq’s Defense Ministry announced the deaths on October 14. Spokesman Maj. Gen. Yahya Rasool Abdullah said the ministry mourned “Brigadier General Ahat Yasser Khudair Hussein, Commander of the 11th Infantry Division’s Communications Directorate, and Warrant Officer Mutaz Shahid Abbas,” the state-run Iraqi News Agency reported. The ministry said the two were killed “by an explosive device—a remnant of the terrorist ISIS gangs—while inspecting the site of an airstrike that had targeted a terrorist cell safehouse in Wadi Zaghytoun, Kirkuk Governorate.”

The name ISIS printed, “Ahat Yasir Husayn,” matches the ministry’s, minus the middle name Khudair. The rank, the unit and the date match too. The difference is the device. ISIS says its fighters detonated a bomb on a patrol. The ministry called it a remnant left behind by ISIS. A Kurdish broadcaster, Channel 8, noted that the available information “does not establish who planted the device or confirm responsibility for the blast,” in its report.

The day before, Iraq’s Security Media Cell said F-16s had carried out three strikes on ISIS hideouts in the valley, the Iraqi News Agency reported. A security source told 964media the unit had entered the valley “to inspect the site and recover the bodies of two militants killed in Tuesday’s F-16 strike when the device went off.” Both accounts are consistent with al-Naba’s line that the patrol was heading to a bombed position.

Casualty counts vary. ISIS claims two dead and two wounded. Rudaw reported two more soldiers were injured. Channel 8 reported three wounded, and placed the blast at about 9:10 a.m., which fits al-Naba’s “Wednesday morning.” By that evening, a security source told Shafaq the toll had risen to three after Safaa Shayaa, “a member of the Iraqi Army’s 11th Division,” died of his wounds. Al-Naba, published eight days later, still counts two dead.

The valley sits in Kirkuk’s rural south, where Iraqi forces have repeatedly targeted ISIS hideouts. On August 11, three soldiers, including two officers, were wounded by an explosive device while inspecting bombed sites southwest of Daquq, and in early July a Counter-Terrorism Service officer was killed in a clash with ISIS militants north of Kirkuk, 964media reported. Local outlet Plus4 placed the October 14 blast near the village of al-Awashra in al-Rashad subdistrict.

Nigeria: The Kanamma Ambush and a Wrecked Truck

The West Africa claims fill most of the issue. The centerpiece is an ambush on Monday, October 19, on the road from Kanamma to Geidam in Yobe State. On October 21, Amaq News Agency, the group’s news agency, published the claim. It reads:

Al-Naba issue 570 runs its own version of the claim, calling the dead commander “a high-ranking officer”:

Nigerian outlets reported the ambush the same day. “The commanding officer and three other soldiers in the first vehicle died in the initial attack, while three additional soldiers were killed with scores of the attackers during the ensuing exchange of gunfire,” a source told Vanguard. Yerwa Express News said the convoy was led by a major who was the commanding officer, and corrected its time of attack to 8 a.m. AFP’s military source said “at least five” soldiers were killed when their vehicle hit a landmine in Bulabuwarna village, about seven kilometers from Geidam, where troops were then ambushed. The Cabal reported eight soldiers wounded, and said neither the security agencies nor the Yobe State government had issued a statement.

The press accounts and the ISIS claim line up on the commander’s death, the roadside bomb, the follow-up gunfire and a toll of roughly six or seven. Nigerian accounts also say troops inflicted heavy losses on the attackers, which ISIS does not mention. The Nigerian Army has not publicly named the officer or released a toll, The Cabal reported.

The truck’s marking points to a unit. The Nigerian Army has said troops of 159 Battalion were deployed at a forward operating base in Kanamma, in a 2019 statement on a repelled attack there. There is no public confirmation that the battalion is still based there or that the commander killed on October 19 led it.

Amaq’s claim ends by noting “a senior officer and 15 soldiers were killed a few days ago.” Al-Naba’s two-month West Africa infographic claims “15 killed, among them an officer,” in an attack on an army camp in the town of Kukawa, Borno, on 25 Rabi al-Akhir, or October 6. The Nigerian Army said soldiers were killed in a “coordinated multi-directional assault” in Kukawa on October 8, TheCable reported.

West Africa: Mairari, Gamboru and Adamawa

Al-Naba’s front page claims more than 32 Nigerian soldiers killed this week, “among them two prominent officers,” plus five allied militiamen and eight soldiers from neighboring Niger. It claims a camp and a position burned and 23 vehicles destroyed, disabled or seized. The front page counts 22 destroyed plus one seized; the inside page counts 23 destroyed plus one seized. The front-page lead reads:

The largest single claim is a second raid in under a month on the army camp at Mairari, in Borno’s Guzamala area, on the evening of Tuesday, October 13. Al-Naba claims more than an hour of fighting, an officer serving as “deputy camp commander” killed along with 20 others, including five militiamen, and the camp burned with five armored vehicles, two trucks and 11 pickups inside.

That raid is the best documented. A military officer told AFP that 15 soldiers and five members of the Civilian Joint Task Force were killed, NTA reported. Military sources told Reuters at least 10 soldiers were killed and 20 wounded, and on October 17 the group claimed 21 killed on Telegram, according to a Reuters report carried by Devdiscourse. Al-Naba’s 20-plus-one figure matches the claim Reuters reported.

Al-Naba also claims a Saturday, October 17, roadside bomb on a patrol between Logomani and Gamboru, in Borno, that destroyed a pickup “and killed those inside.”

AFP’s sources said eight soldiers died that day when their vehicle hit a mine near Kinuba, about 25 kilometers from Gamboru. “All eight soldiers in the vehicle were killed in the explosion,” a military officer said, according to Vanguard.

In Adamawa, the issue claims an attack on an army position at “Tilabala” on October 17 that killed three soldiers, and raids on two villages it calls Christian, with three churches burned. One of those raids, on a village al-Naba spells “Zaghulakulwa” on Thursday, October 15, appears to match a reported attack that night on Dzangola Kilba, in Adamawa’s Gombi area.

Gunmen burned eight houses, seven shops and part of a church in Dzangola Kilba and killed an elderly man, EYN News reported. The army-position claim could not be independently confirmed.

Niger: Eight Soldiers Claimed, None Confirmed

The issue claims eight Nigerien soldiers killed in the Diffa region on the border with Nigeria. Seven, it says, died when a bomb hit a pickup returning from a Nigerian army camp, on Sunday, 30 Rabi al-Akhir, or October 11. It says an eighth was shot dead in his home in Diffa city on “Monday (7 Jumada al-Ula).” That date fell on a Sunday, October 18, by the Egyptian astronomy institute’s calendar.

No Nigerien or Nigerian report of either incident has surfaced. Niger’s operations center said the first half of October was “globalement calme et sous contrôle,” in a bulletin carried by the national news agency ANP. That bulletin reported troops killed four Boko Haram fighters near N’Guigmi airfield on October 9 and listed no army losses.

Pakistan and Congo

ISIS’s Khorasan Province claims five attacks in Pakistan’s Bajaur district, near the Afghan border, killing five people and wounding two. It lists a policeman, three soldiers, two men it calls spies for Pakistani intelligence and a member of the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group. The first is a shooting in the village of Asil Targao, in Barang, on Monday, October 12:

A police official told Dawn that assailants killed Constable Irshad Khan in “the hilly Asil Targao area” that day, and that no one had claimed responsibility. The Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium logged the last of the five, the October 19 killing of an intelligence officer in Kohei village, Salarzai, as an ISIS-Khorasan assassination.

In Congo, ISIS’s Central Africa Province claims one attack, on Monday, October 19: a raid on an army barracks in the village of “Mongwiko,” in Ituri, which it says the soldiers fled before fighters burned it. No casualties are claimed.

The issue says nothing about the killing of 10 people at mining sites in Ituri’s Mambasa territory overnight into October 16, in an attack attributed to the Allied Democratic Forces, which fight under ISIS’s Central Africa banner, Actualite.cd reported.

The Weekly Tally

Page two of the issue is al-Naba’s regular “Harvest of the Soldiers” infographic. It covers attacks “published during a week,” from 4 to 10 Jumada al-Ula, or October 15 to 21. Because it counts claims by publication date, it likely includes the October 19 Kanamma ambush and may include earlier attacks published that week, such as Mairari.

The full page breaks the 57 down as 52 people it calls “infidels and apostates,” four it labels with its anti-Shiite slur and one it calls a “crusader.” By province, it lists 11 operations and 46 killed and wounded in West Africa, five operations and seven casualties in Khorasan, one operation and four casualties in Iraq, all in Kirkuk, and one operation in Central Africa. It lists no attack in Syria, now governed by a former jihadist, or in Somalia, Mozambique, the Sahel or Yemen.

A separate back-page infographic tallies two months of West Africa claims, from 10 Rabi al-Awwal to 10 Jumada al-Ula, or August 23 to October 21. It claims 76 attacks and 231 killed and wounded, “among them five commanders.” The United Nations Monitoring Team called ISWAP the most active ISIS affiliate, saying member states reported it conducted “over 174 attacks” from January to May, in its August 2026 report.

The Front Page

The masthead reads “Issue 570 | Year Eighteen | Thursday 11 Jumada al-Ula 1448 AH | 8 pages.” The Islamic dates check out. Egypt’s National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics put the first of Jumada al-Ula 1448 on Monday, October 12, al-Masry al-Youm reported. That makes 3 Jumada al-Ula Wednesday, October 14, the day of the Kirkuk blast, and 11 Jumada al-Ula Thursday, October 22. Issue 569 carried 4 Jumada al-Ula, one week earlier.

The “eighteenth year” counts from the paper’s origins. Al-Naba “has existed in various forms since 2010, when it was first introduced by ISI, the Islamic State’s predecessor,” the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation found in 2018. That year was 1431 on the Islamic calendar, which makes 1448 the eighteenth. The same report counted 135 weekly editions by June 2018. The 435 issues since then match, almost exactly, the number of weeks that have passed.

The Editorial: “Their Enmity Increases Our Certainty”

The issue’s editorial, on page three, is titled “Their Enmity Increases Our Certainty.” It argues that each campaign against the group has hardened it, and casts ISIS fighters as heirs of the prophets in a long war with “the nations of unbelief.”

“Whenever they thought they had extinguished the fire of jihad with their campaigns and raids, the mujahideen emerged more steadfast and tougher, rising from among the rubble,” the editorial says. “The attempts of God’s enemies to eliminate the Islamic State, to abolish its project, or to shake its emirs and bend their resolve have failed,” it adds. It tells the believer to know “that he is an army, even if he is alone,” and says he is commanded “to terrorize the enemies of God by every means.”

A page-seven essay on God as provider makes a related point about money. It mocks world powers for boasting of their weapons and budgets while suffering “financial problems, economic collapses, and turmoil in stocks and currencies,” and says God provides for the fighters in spite of the unbelievers’ siege, “even by the hands of the unbelievers themselves, willingly or unwillingly, through money and through fighting.”

That message reaches an Iraq that the United States has largely left. On September 30, U.S. Central Command completed its departure from Erbil Air Base, ending the Operation Inherent Resolve mission in Iraq, and its commander, Adm. Brad Cooper, said ISIS “no longer poses a systemic threat to Iraq’s national security,” according to the command’s release. The UN Monitoring Team assessed in August that ISIS in Iraq was “at its weakest” and numbered in “the low hundreds of fighters able to carry out unsophisticated operations.”

The newspaper has outlasted years of platform takedowns. The same UN report said ISIS propaganda “remained centred around its weekly newsletter, Al-Naba.” For readers in Kirkuk, issue 570 is a reminder of a different durability. Two weeks after U.S. forces left, the Defense Ministry mourned a brigadier general of the 11th Division, and Shafaq News reported that a third soldier, Safaa Shayaa, had died of his wounds.

Colin Aamot is an investigative journalist and OSINT domain expert specializing in FOIA and public records. A technologist, U.S. Army veteran, and former Capitol Hill staffer, he has held director roles across the private and public sectors.Full bio