British police confirmed their counter terrorism units had arrested three men in their 30s and a 52-year-old from four separate locations in the Midlands and north east of the country as part of the sting.
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The Italian authorities, who are leading the investigation, said police arrested seven people in Italy, four in the United Kingdom, three in Norway and one in Finland.
17 individuals have been targeted by authorities in raids in a number of European nations connected into a suspected jihadist network.
The emergence of ISIL provided Rawti Shax with a training ground, and at least six people were recruited to fight in Iraq and Syria, said Italian officials.
“(Rawti Shax’s) primary objective is to violently overthrow” the leaders of the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq and replace them “with a caliphate governed by Sharia law”, Eurojust said in a news release.
Among at least 15 suspected members of the militant Islamist group arrested was the group’s imprisoned leader, Mullah Krekar. The 59-year-old Kurd, who came to Norway as a refugee in 1991, was convicted in 2005 for a similar offence.
In a tweet late Thursday afternoon, Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) said that “the NBI is correcting incorrect information that has been spread by the media: No-one has been detained in Finland in [connection with] the Italian case”. According to Governale, it was close to “sending many other jihadists overseas; it was about to carry out attacks, including suicide bombings, to try to free their chief, Mullah Krekar”.
They face extradition to Italy. They acknowledge that they know Krekar, but the attorney for the 42-year old said her client “strongly disagrees that they have been involved in any criminal activities together”.
Last month, Ahmad was sentenced to 18 months in jail for praising the killings of cartoonists at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which had lampooned Islam and other religions.
Krekar made news in 2012, when he was jailed after making death threats to Erna Solberg, Norway’s current Prime Minister who was then an emerging figure of the Conservative Party.
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A joint Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga and U.S. operation ultimately cleared Ansar al-Islam from its mountain hideout, but the group and offshoots reportedly maintained cells in the area and remained active through a network of mosques. It reportedly merged with Islamic State past year.
