Security forces free Iraq's eastern province of Diyala

The Iraqi security forces on Monday freed the country's eastern province of Diyala from the Islamic State (IS) militants after three days of fierce clashes, the provincial police chief and security source said.

"Diyala province is now free from the IS militant group completely after the military offensive that started on Friday and ended on Sunday night," Lieutenant General Jamil al-Shimary told reporters.

Earlier, Hadi al-Ameri, a leading figure in the powerful Shiite party Badr Organization confirmed that the whole province is now free from IS militants and that some 58 security members were killed and hundreds wounded.

"A total of 58 security members were killed and 248 others wounded by the latest battles which defeated the last redoubts of Daash (the first Arabic letters of the IS extremist group) in the areas of Mansouriya and near the town of Maqdadiyah, some 100 km northeast of Baghdad," the state-run Iraqiya channel quoted Hadi al-Ameri as saying during his presence with the troops at the battlefields in Diyala.

Nearly half of the casualties were from the Shiite militias which teamed up with the Iraqi security forces in the battles against the IS militants, said Ameri, whose Badr group members are part of the militias.

"Diyala has been fully freed, but some individuals from IS militants are now separately hiding in some orchards and hideouts, but they will be hunted down by the security forces," Ameri said, adding that the next battles will concentrate on freeing Salahudin's provincial capital of Tikrit, some 170 km north of Baghdad, as well as the provincial towns of Alam and Dowr.

Ameri's Badr Organization was previously known as Badr Brigade which maintains its longtime ties with the neighboring Iran, where it was first built during the eight-year Iraqi-Iranian war in 1980s.

Ameri's Brigade emerged as powerful militia during the years that followed the U.S.-led invasion to Iraq in 2003 before turning to be political organization a few years later. Badr Brigade was the military wing of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a Shiite party headed by Shiite cleric Ammar al-Hakim.

On Friday, thousands of Iraqi army, police and Shiite militias backed by Iraqi aircraft launched a major offensive with the aim of ending the presence of the extremist militants in the country's province of Diyala.

However, despite the announcement of liberating Diyala, three Shiite militiamen were killed and four wounded on Monday morning when a roadside bomb struck a Shiite militia vehicle near an orchard in northeast of Maqdadiyah, a provincial police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

The security situation in Iraq began to drastically deteriorate on June 10, 2014, when bloody clashes broke out between the Iraqi security forces and the IS group who took control of the country's northern province of Nineveh and later seized swathes of territories after Iraqi security forces abandoned their posts in other predominantly Sunni provinces. Endit