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7 killed in bombings, airstrike in Iraq

Xinhua, June 23, 2015 Adjust font size:

Seven people were killed and 14 others injured Tuesday in attacks and airstrikes in Iraq, while clashes with Islamic State (IS) militants continued in the provinces of Salahudin and Anbar, security sources said.

In Salahudin province, four Shiite militiamen were killed and five others injured in Tikrit, 170 km north of Baghdad, when two booby-trapped houses detonated during attempts to defuse the explosives planted earlier by IS militants, a provincial security source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

Elsewhere, Ahmad Ali al-Qaiysi, professor of Islamic studies at Salahudin University, was executed by IS militants as he refused to swear allegiance to their self-proclaimed state, at a village in north of Baiji, 200 km north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, the source said.

For days now, Baiji and Iraq's adjacent largest oil refinery have witnessed heavy clashes between troops and IS militants, as the troops are fighting to free the town from IS militants who captured parts of it and the refinery, the source added.

Since March 2, security forces and thousands of allied Shiite and Sunni militias have been involved in Iraq's biggest offensive in order to recapture from IS militants the northern part of Salahudin province, including Tikrit and other key towns and villages.

In Iraq's western province of Anbar, two people were killed and nine others injured when an army helicopter gunship pounded the IS-held town of Garma close to the militant-seized city of Fallujah, 50 km west of Baghdad, a provincial security source informed Xinhua.

Meanwhile, sporadic clashes persist between Iraqi forces and IS militants in the east of the IS-held provincial capital city of Ramadi, 110 km west of Baghdad, as well as the city of Fallujah and Garma, said the source without giving further details.

In the past few months, IS have seized most of the Anbar province and attempted to overtake Baghdad, however several counter attacks by security forces and Shiite militias have successfully repelled them.

The security situation in Iraq has deteriorated drastically since June of last year, when bloody clashes broke out between Iraqi security forces and IS militants, who seized the country's northern city of Mosul along with vast territories once Iraqi security forces abandoned their posts in Nineveh and other predominantly Sunni provinces. Endit