European law enforcement announced Thursday that they have arrested 15 people if four European countries who were connected to a suspected jihadist network aimed at recruiting militants to fight in Iraq and Syria and overthrow the Kurdish government in northern Iraq.
The arrests - seven in Italy, four in Britain, three in Norway and one in Finland - were the result of a a four-year investigation led by the Italian authorities into Rawti Shax, a Norwegian-based organization led by an Iraqi Kurdish cleric, according to the BBC.
"The investigation developed out of computer evidence, as their operating base was mostly the web, the world of the Internet," the public prosecutor in Rome, Giuseppe Pignatone, said at a news conference.
The cleric, Mullah Krekar, is already in a Norwegian prison serving an 18-month sentence for praising the killing of staff at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in January, as well as urging others to kill a Kurdish immigrant in Norway, according to The New York Times.
The suspects face a court hearing Friday in Oslo, Norway, and are likely to face charges in Italy of conspiracy to commit international terrorism.
Italian authorities said arrest warrants were issued against 17 people, but some of them could not be located, reported CBS News. Though the discrepencies couldn't be immediately explained, it is believed at least one of them died after going to Iraq in 2014.
Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg, speaking from Valetta, Malta, where she was taking part in an European Union summit on the migrant crisis, was pleased with the results saying, "If this means that Krekar leaves Norway, that's fine."
