Baku-APA. A total of 20 insurgent militants were killed on Thursday in separate attacks which aimed at seizing a city and a town in western and central Iraq respectively, security sources said, APA reports quoting Xinhua.
Late on Wednesday, gunmen affiliated to the Islamic State militant group, an al-Qaida offshoot, carried out an attack to seize the town of Duluiyah in Salahudin province, some 90 km north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, but were repelled by local police and Sunni tribal fighters, a police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
The battle, which continued till the dawn on Thursday, left at least eight Islamic militants killed and destroyed several of their vehicles, while two of the tribal fighters were wounded, the source said.
Meanwhile, fierce battles between security forces and Islamic militants occurred on the northern entrance of the city of Haditha, some 200 km west of Baghdad, leaving at least 12 militants killed, a provincial security source said.
Haditha and the nearby dam on the Euphrates river have been the scene of several attacks by the Islamic militants who tried to seize the area to control the strategic dam, but their attempt failed so far by the cooperation of the security forces and local government-backed Sahwa paramilitary group members, the source added.
The Sahwa militia, also known as the Awakening Council or the Sons of Iraq, consists of armed groups, including some powerful anti-U.S. Sunni insurgent groups during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
The groups turned their rifles from the U.S. forces to al-Qaida network after rifts appeared between the Sunni tribes and the extremist al-Qaida group which adopted hardline Islam and exercised indiscriminate killings against both Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities.
Iraq has seen drastic security deterioration in the country that started on June 10, when bloody clashes broke out between Iraqi security forces and Sunni militants who took control of the country's northern city of Mosul and later seized swathes of territories in Nineveh and other predominantly Sunni provinces.
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