IS leader for Anbar killed in strike

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WASHINGTON, May 9, (Agencies): A US-led coalition air strike has killed a senior Islamic State leader in Iraq’s Anbar province and three other jihadists, the Pentagon said Monday. “On May 6, a coalition air strike targeted Abu Wahib, ISIL’s military emir for Anbar province and a former member of al-Qaeda in Iraq who has appeared in ISIL execution videos,” Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said, using an acronym for the IS group. Meanwhile, a car bomb claimed by Islamic State in the eastern Iraqi city of Baquba killed at least 12 people on Monday and wounded more than 40 near a popular restaurant close to the city centre, police and hospital sources said.

The Amaq news agency, which supports Islamic State, said a suicide bomber had targeted Shi’ite Muslim militia fighters in the provincial capital of Diyala, a mixed Shi’ite and Sunni Muslim area bordering Iran.

The sources said they expected the death toll to rise. Iraqi officials declared victory over Islamic State in Diyala more than a year ago, after security forces and Shi’ite militias drove them out of towns and villages there. But the insurgents have remained active and militia elements have been accused of abuses against Sunni residents. The fight against Islamic State has exacerbated a long-running sectarian conflict in Iraq, mostly between the Shi’ite majority and the Sunni minority. Bombings in Baquba and a nearby town in January set off a string of apparently retaliatory attacks against Sunnis.

Sectarian violence also threatens to undermine efforts by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, a moderate Shi’ite Islamist, to dislodge the militant group from areas in the north and west that they seized in 2014. Iraqi forces retook a northern village from Islamic State on Monday, supported by artillery and air strikes from a US-led coalition, as they try to close in on the city of Mosul. In March, Iraq’s military opened a new front against the militants in the Makhmour area, which it called the first phase of a wider campaign to liberate Mosul, around 60 kms (40 miles) further north.

But progress has been slow, and to date Iraqi forces have taken just five villages. “In a swift operation, our units took the groups of the terrorist organisation Daesh by surprise and entered the village,” read a statement from the Nineveh Operations Command, using an Arabic acronym for Islamic State. A source involved in the operation said the militants put up little resistance in the village of Kabrouk. The advance brings Iraqi forces slightly closer to the oil town of Qayyara on the western banks of the Tigris River, control of which would help to isolate Mosul from territory the militants hold further south and east.

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