Kurdish fighters repel IS attack, violence continues in Iraq

Iraqi Kurdish fighters, known as Peshmerga, repelled an attack by Islamic State (IS) militants on a village in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan, while violent deadly attacks continued across the country, security sources said on Wednesday.

Late on Tuesday night, IS militants attacked the village of Sultan Abdullah near the town of Gwer, some 40 km south of the regional capital city of Arbil, the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

The attackers first managed to seize the village and surrounding areas, but several hours of battles with the Peshmerga fighters, covered by U.S.-led aircraft, forced them to withdraw, the source said.

Dozens of extremist militants were killed by the heavy clashes and their bodies were left in the battleground, the source said without giving further details.

The militants in August captured Gwer and the nearby town of Makhmour, posing an imminent threat to the Kurdish capital but the attackers were pushed back by heavy clashes with the Peshmerga and international air support.

In Salahudin province, at least six security members were killed and 19 others wounded when a suicide bomber rammed his explosive-laden car into a checkpoint manned by soldiers and Shiite militias at the entrance of a military base, just west of the city of Samarra, some 120 km north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, a provincial security source anonymously told Xinhua.

Also in the province, gunmen using silenced weapons separately shot dead a cleric of a Sunni mosque and a civilian in the town of Tuz-Khurmato, some 180 km north of Baghdad, the source said, adding that the civilian was identified later as an internally displaced person (IDP) who resorted to the town after the IS militants seized their homes elsewhere in the province.

Meanwhile, hundreds of families fled their homes in Salahudin's provincial capital city of Tikrit and the surrounding towns of Alam, Dowr and Albu Ajil, to safer areas after calls by the security forces and allied militias for the remaining residents to depart their homes as major offensive looms to free their areas from the IS militants, the source added.

Salahudin is a predominantly Sunni province and its capital Tikrit, some 170 km north of Baghdad, is the hometown of former President Saddam Hussein.

In Iraq's eastern province of Diyala, a Shiite militiaman was killed and three others were wounded in a roadside bomb attack near their vehicle at a village in north of the volatile town of Maqdadiyah, some 100 km northeast of Baghdad, a provincial police source said.

The security situation in Iraq began to drastically deteriorate on June 10, when bloody clashes broke out between the Iraqi security forces and the IS group, an al-Qaida offshoot, 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.

Iraq has been witnessing some of the worst violence in years. Terrorism and violence killed at least 12,282 civilians and injured 23,126 others in 2014, making it the deadliest year since the sectarian violence in the 2006-2007 period, according to a recent UN report. Enditem