A joint Iraqi military force launched a major military operation to hunt down the extremists and cells related to ISSI extremist group, as they raided their strongholds in the northwestern areas of the city of Baquba in Diyala province. Popular Mobilization Forces managed to liberate the villages of Tuman and Faras al-Fars, northwest of the liberated district of al-Baaj, west of Nineveh.
Meanwhile, the joint Iraqi forces attacked the old area on the right side of the city of Mosul and found a prison for the extremist group of ISIS containing the remains of people who were brutally killed in the northern side of the Iraqi city. Iraqi Federal Police forces on Monday aimed again at the strategic, Islamic State-held Old City from the southern entrances, reopening an old front they had ceded late April.
The service’s chief, Lt. Gen. Shaker Jawdat, said early Monday that his forces, backed by army warplanes, started attacking Islamic State militants’ defenses south of the Old City, killing seven members before besieging Bab al-Jadid neighborhood.
Jawdat said his forces had also run into a prison run by Islamic State militants in the recaptured district of 17 Tamuz. He said forces found corpses of two men and a woman who had apparently been “brutally killed” before the prison was set to fire.
Iraqi government troops, regained control over eastern Mosul in January after three months of fighting. Operations for the western side of the city launched in mid February, and Iraqi generals say a few hundreds of IS fighters remain in the Old City as a last refuge. Troops began to march toward the Old City from the northwest since late April, recapturing all but three districts surrounding the area.
Some commanders hope the city will be recaptured on June 10th, the day it fell to IS fighters in 2014. They had previously predicted the city to be liberated before the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, which began May 27th.
In the same context, A Peshmerga fighter was wounded as a bomb blast targeted security patrol, east of Diyala province, a local source has said. “A bomb placed on the side of an agricultural road near al-Tabaj region, northeast of Baqubah, exploded on Monday, leaving a Peshmerga fighter injured,” the source told AlSumaria News.
“Security team conducted investigations on the accident and transferred the victim to a nearby hospital for treatment,” the anonymous source added. Several attacks were launched against the Kurdish troops over the past few months at regions the forces are deployed at in Diyala claiming lives of many of them.
On Sunday, the Kurdistan Region’s Government said number of Kurdish fighters killed since the breakout of the Iraqi war against Islamic State militants in 2014 stood at 1760. Meanwhile, the military intelligence department said in a statement that one militant was killed as a group attacked security personnel in the province.
The statement added that the militant was injured before troops followed him and were able to kill him. Violence in the country has surged further with the emergence of Islamic State Sunni extremist militants who proclaimed an “Islamic Caliphate” in Iraq and Syria in 2014. According to a monthly count released on Thursday by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq, violence and armed conflicts left 824 Iraqis dead and wounded during the month of May.
Nineveh came on top of the most affected governorates with 354 Iraqi civilians were killed and another 470 injured. Baghdad came in second place with 86 victims and 22 injured. Anbar came third with a total of 136 casualties (47 killed and 89 injured) The total number of victims marked a rise from 317 Iraqis in April. In March, the victims reached 1115, according to UNAMI.