ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq – Iraq on Wednesday sentenced six alleged Islamic State (ISIS) members to death, including the extremist group's so-called “Governor of Anbar,” following judicial investigations.

“Six terrorists, including the so-called ‘Governor of Anbar’ for the ISIS terrorist organization, have been sentenced to death by hanging by the Karkh Criminal Court,” Iraq’s National Security Service (INSS) said in a statement.

The sentences were issued following “judicial investigations” by Baghdad’s Karkh investigative court specialized in INSS-related cases, the statement added.

In February, the INSS said that security forces dismantled a “complex” ISIS cell in Anbar province and arrested Abu Ayman al-Rawi, the group’s so-called Governor of Anbar, who was “apprehended while wearing a suicide belt, just before he could carry out his plans.”

Anbar is a vast Sunni-majority desert province stretching along the border with Syria.

In its annual report for 2025, Amnesty International said that executions in Iraq declined compared with at least 63 recorded in 2024, but said the exact number for 2025 remained unclear.

According to the report, Iraqi courts issued at least 79 death sentences in 2025, marking a 61 percent decrease from at least 200 recorded the previous year. Amnesty also said Iraq continued to use hanging as a method of execution.

ISIS swept through swathes of Iraqi land in 2014 in a brazen offensive, seizing the country’s second-largest city of Mosul and proclaiming it as its so-called “caliphate” in the process.

The jihadists’ territorial “caliphate” was brought to an end in Iraq in 2017 after Iraqi and Kurdish forces, supported by a US-led international coalition, drove out the group.