Security forces fight IS militants in Iraq

Iraqi security forces continued their clashes against the Islamic State (IS) militant group in Iraq on Thursday, as militiamen destroyed Sunni mosques and houses in towns recently freed from extremist IS militants, security sources said.
In Iraq's eastern province of Diyala, the security forces, backed by Shiite militias and Kurdish forces known as Peshmerga, fiercely clashes with the IS militants and cleared 13 villages in Tabaj area, some 150 km northeast of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, killing at least seven militants and destroying three vehicles loaded with weapons and ammunition, a provincial security source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
During the battles, dozens of IS militants fled the villages to the nearby mountainous area of Himreen, the source said.
In a separate incident, the security forces killed a leader of the IS militant group and three of his aides during a raid on their safe house at a village near the town of Jalawlaa, some 130 km northeast of Baghdad, the source added.
Meanwhile, Shiite militiamen blew up six Sunni mosques and set fire to more than 30 houses during the past 24 hours in the two predominantly Sunni towns of Saadiyah and Jalawlaa, which have been freed in the past few days from the IS militants, the source said.
Observers see the attacks against mosques and houses as a kind of sectarian provocation that would only incite anger among residents of the Sunni towns and send a wrong message to the Iraqi Sunni community.
Also in the province, a Shiite militiaman was killed and four others wounded while a booby-trapped house that they were searching was detonated in the town of Saadiyah, about 140 km northeast of Baghdad, he said.
The towns of Jalawlaa, Saadiyah and Tabaj are part of the disputed areas which are ethnically mixed with Kurds, Arabs, Turkmens and others. The Kurds have demanded to expand their autonomous region in northern Iraq to include the oil-rich province of Kirkuk and other areas in the Iraqi provinces of Nineveh, Salahudin and Diyala, but their move is fiercely opposed by the government in Baghdad.
In Salahudin province, the security forces killed eight IS militants during a clearance operation in some neighborhoods in the town of Baiji, some 200 km north of Baghdad, a provincial security source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
Earlier in the month, government troops recaptured Baiji and the nearby oil refinery after fierce clashes with the extremist militants.
The security situation in Iraq has begun to drastically deteriorate since June 10, when bloody clashes broke out between the Iraqi security forces and the IS group, an al-Qaida offshoot, which 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 Sunni provinces.