Iraqi air strikes kill 19 around militant-held Fallujah — official

FALLUJAH — Iraqi government air strikes killed 19 people, including children, in Fallujah on Monday and Tuesday, a health official in the militant-held city said.

The Iraqi army has been shelling Fallujah, 70km west of Baghdad, for months, trying to drive out Sunni militants from the group now known as Islamic State. The insurgents, backed by discontented local Sunni tribal leaders, overran the city in January.

Ahmed Al Shami, spokesman for the Fallujah health office — the local arm of the health ministry — said the 19 dead included women and children and that Fallujah hospital had also received 38 wounded people since Monday evening.

Residents of Fallujah and the nearby town of Garma said helicopters fired artillery and dropped three barrel bombs on Fallujah and two on Garma.

Barrel bombs — powerful makeshift weapons made from high explosives, cement and metal parts packed into oil drums, usually dropped from helicopters — have gained notoriety in the region because of their use in neighbouring Syria by President Bashar Assad’s forces to flatten buildings in rebel-held area.

Scores of people have died since January in what residents describe as indiscriminate bombardment. In May, witnesses in Fallujah said barrel bombs had been dropped on the city.

The government denies indiscriminate attacks, saying it targets insurgents, but a mid-level security officer in Anbar province has previously confirmed that barrel bombs have been dropped on Fallujah.

Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki’s military spokesman, Lieutenant General Qassim Atta, was not immediately available to comment on this week’s attacks.

Some 560,000 people have fled Anbar province — the large area of western Iraq where Fallujah is located —since the Islamic State takeover in January, according to the International Rescue Committee, a New York-based humanitarian organisation.

Islamic State took a swathe of northern territory last month in an assault that caused large numbers of government soldiers to desert, shifting the main battleground in a civil war pitting the Shiite-led Baghdad government against a well-equipped Sunni insurgency.

Maliki’s office said on Tuesday he had met Sunni tribal leaders from several provinces where the conflict is raging. Anger with Maliki’s government has encouraged some Sunni armed groups to stick with the hardline Islamic State despite ideological differences, officials and tribal leaders say.

The conflict, which threatens to break up Iraq along ethnic and sectarian lines, has killed almost 5,600 civilians this year, according to the latest United Nations figures.

In the mainly Shiitetown of Nahrawan east of Baghdad, a car bomb exploded in a market on Tuesday killing five people and wounding 13, police and medical sources said.

A roadside bomb targeting an army patrol in the Abu Ghraib area, west of Baghdad, killed one soldier and wounded four, police and medical sources said. Two mortar rounds landed in the mostly Shiite area of Sabaa Al Bour just north of the capital, killing one person, police and medics there said.

In the town of Abu Al Khaseeb, south of the predominantly Shiite city of Basra, gunmen broke into a Sunni mosque on Tuesday during prayers, killing the preacher and kidnapping four men who were praying, police sources said.

The body of one of the kidnapped men was found dumped on the side of a road near the mosque, the sources said.