BAGHDAD (Dispatches) – Daesh 
terrorists abducted a civilian from a village in Iraq’s northern Kirkuk province late Wednesday, while a Baghdad court on Thursday sentenced three French nationals to life imprisonment for joining the takfiri group, security and judicial sources said.
The kidnapping occurred in Al-Sayha village in the Hawija district, southwest of Kirkuk, according to a local security source who spoke to Shafaq News on Thursday. 
The assailants exploited poor visibility caused by adverse weather to infiltrate the area, the source said, adding that security forces were searching for the missing resident and tracking the kidnappers’ escape routes. 
The Hawija district, roughly 60 kilometers southwest of Kirkuk city, is a known area of operation for Daesh sleeper cells, which frequently exploit security gaps and agricultural terrain to conduct attacks, particularly during poor weather when aerial and ground surveillance is degraded.
The victim’s fate remained unknown as of Friday. 
In Baghdad, the Al-Karkh Criminal Court sentenced three French nationals—Charly Sun, Kamal Ben Mbarek, and Amir Amine Dali Amar—to life imprisonment, which in Iraq amounts to 20 years, for membership in Daesh and contributing to spreading terror, according to a court statement and an AFP correspondent present at the hearing. 
The three were among a group of 47 French nationals transferred from northeastern Syria to Iraqi custody last year. Tuesday’s proceedings saw six other French nationals sentenced to life and a seventh to 15 years on similar charges.
French diplomatic sources said Paris noted the sentences were stipulated under Iraqi law and that embassy representatives observed the hearings.
Separately, the Popular Mobilization Forces’ 34th Brigade intelligence unit arrested a suspected Daesh member at an entrance to Nineveh province on Thursday after a security database check linked him to the organization, the PMF said in a statement.
Security analysts describe the recent pattern of Daesh activity in Iraq as a shift from territorial control toward decentralized attrition operations, including kidnappings, ambushes, and improvised explosive devices, rather than attempts to hold ground. 
Earlier this month, Daesh militants attacked Iraqi security positions near Al-Bargliya–Al-Danadish village in Hawija on two consecutive days, killing a Federal Police officer and wounding four others, and targeting thermal surveillance equipment used to monitor rural areas at night. 
The abductions and arrests come as the Trump administration presses Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi to disarm resistance groups, including the Popular Mobilization Forces, setting a September 2026 deadline that has since been extended to June 2027. 
Washington has leveraged restrictions on Iraq’s access to dollar shipments from oil revenues held at the Federal Reserve.
Yet the forces targeted by that pressure—the PMF and allied groups—have been the primary ground-level counterweight to Daesh remnants in precisely the areas now witnessing renewed attacks, including Hawija, Kirkuk, and the rural stretches of Nineveh and Saladin provinces. 
Iraqi security officials have acknowledged that government forces lack the advanced surveillance and targeting capabilities the PMF’s intelligence units partially fill.