After crushing blows in Iraq and Syria, global jihadists could be eyeing Egypt's Sinai Peninsula as a new home base, the army said Thursday, as it presses an offensive in the region.

Cairo last week announced a major operation against jihadists across swathes of territory, including the volatile region which has been at the heart of a persistent Islamic State group insurgency.

The security sweep in the Sinai, Nile Delta and Western Desert near the border with Libya comes as the country prepares for polls next month in which President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is seeking re-election.

Army spokesman Tamer el-Refai said at a press conference broadcast Thursday that intelligence showed that jihadists were planning "to create a new terrorist home base in another area that could potentially be the Sinai Peninsula".

The spokesman told a tightly controlled press conference that 53 jihadists have been killed since the start of the operation, while more than 600 people have been detained.

There was no way to independently verify the figures given.

In November, Sisi ordered his armed forces chief of staff to restore security in Sinai within three months after militants killed more than 300 worshippers at a mosque.

Egypt has been under a state of emergency since April last year, after two suicide bombings at churches claimed by IS killed at least 45 people in the cities of Tanta and Alexandria.

Senior IS leader returned to Iraq from Turkey
Baghdad (AFP) Feb 15, 2018 - Iraqi authorities said Thursday they have managed for the first time to have a top leader of the Islamic State group extradited from Turkey.

Ismail Alwan Salman al-Ithawi, 55, was tracked to Turkey's Sakarya region, detained and returned through cooperation between Turkish, Iraqi and US intelligence agencies, a senior official in the interior ministry's Falcons unit hunting IS members told AFP.

The break came after his unit had "infiltrated the highest levels" of the jihadist group, he said.

A native of the Iraqi city of Ramadi, Ithawi was the group's "minister" in charge of religious edicts and headed a IS committee that decided on senior appointments, according to the official.

He had fled the group's now-shattered "caliphate" in Syria and was living under his brother's name in northern Turkey.

"We asked our ambassador in Ankara to intervene with the Turkish authorities by providing the arrest warrant issued by Iraqi courts and recent photos of Ismail," the official said.

IS swept across Syria and northern Iraq in a lightning advance in 2014, unleashing a reign of terror across a vast swathe of territory that lasted some three years.

The group's territory has now been wiped out in Iraq and reduced to a small foothold in Syria by a series of punishing assaults in both countries.

The focus has since switched to tracking down the group's senior leadership and the thousands of foreign fighters who once flocked to its banner.

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Tillerson calls on allies to focus on fighting IS
Kuwait City (AFP) Feb 13, 2018
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urged allies Tuesday to stay focused on fighting the Islamic State group, saying Turkey's military offensive in northern Syria had "detracted" from the anti-jihadist battle. Tillerson spoke at a ministerial meeting in Kuwait of the US-led military coalition that has been fighting IS in Iraq and Syria, being held in parallel with a conference on reconstruction in Iraq. The jihadist group has lost much of the territory it once controlled when it seized large swa ... read more