Off the wire
East Africa's bloc vows to stabilize Somalia  • 1st LD: Two dead as suicide bomber hits police station in Nigeria: witnesses  • Rotterdam mayor claims city faces no immediate terror threat  • Nigerian political party adopts Jonathan as presidential candidate  • France plans "exceptional" security measures for Sunday high-profile rally  • Italian film director Francesco Rosi dies at 92  • Iran's supreme leader says plunge in oil price "political"  • Chinese skaters start well in Asian single distances  • Taiwan culls 120,000 chickens amid bird flu alert  • China to offer humanitarian aids to Malaysia, Sri Lanka  
You are here:   Home

IS kills 28 Iraqi Kurdish security forces in surprise attack

Xinhua, January 11, 2015 Adjust font size:

About 28 members of Iraqi Kurdish security forces were killed Saturday in an attack by the Islamic State (IS) militant group, a security source said.

A Kurdish security source told Xinhua that IS militants attacked the Kurdish positions by surprise from nine fronts in the early hours of Saturday on the town of Gwer, some 400 km north of Baghdad, killing about 28 members of Kurdish security forces.

The source said that the militants reached Gwer by crossing the Tigris and Ze rivers on boats, and had controlled the area for about one hour before being pushed back by the Kurdish security forces.

A total of 45 IS militants were killed in the clashes, the source added.

Large parts of the province have been under IS control since June 11, a day after bloody clashes broke out between Iraqi security forces and the terrorist group that took control of the country's northern city of Mosul, and later seized swathes of territories in Nineveh and other predominantly Sunni provinces. Enditem