TIKRIT, Iraq Three gunmen opened fire overnight on a cafe in northern Iraq where young men had gathered at the start of the weekend, killing at least 12 and wounding 25, police and hospital sources said on Friday.
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The militants almost overran Balad, 80 kilometres north of Baghdad, in 2014 and maintain a frontline around 40 kilometres away.
Immediately after the suicide attacks, the troops, backed by US -led coalition and Iraqi aircraft, repelled dozens of IS militants attacking the same security positions in the area, killing eight IS militants in addition to the three suicide bombers, the source said without providing details about the casualties among the security forces.
Thursday’s attack comes only one day after at least 89 people were killed and scores injured in Baghdad in a series of attacks for which IS claimed responsibility.
In another development on Wednesday, the Iraqi security forces liberated two villages from Daesh in the city of Khan al-Baghdadi in western Anbar Province, Iraq’s al-Forat news agency reported.
Later Wednesday, a suicide bomber detonated in a busy square in the Shiite neighborhood of al-Kadhimiya in Baghdad, killing 17 people, police officials said.
In Iraq, the USA strategic thinking is more straightforward.
An army colonel told Reuters that militants killed at least 17 soldiers with suicide truck bombs in Jarayshi, 10 km (6 miles) north of Ramadi.
Experts say that as the group’s territorial losses have mounted it has changed tactics, reverting to an earlier strategy of using large bombs to target security forces and Iraq’s Shiite majority, aiming to stoke sectarian strife and undermine faith in the Shiite-led government.
Speaking at the Defense Department outside Washington, he said that Iraqi government forces are making “great progress” in reclaiming land lost to the insurgents.
Volesky offered no timetable for an Iraqi attack on Mosul, which Islamic State fighters have held for two years. In late April the cleric’s supporters stormed Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone and the parliament building.
Iraq’s Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, linked the recent IS attacks to the political turmoil, saying the country faces a “serious challenge” and that the public needs to rise above “grudges and revenge”.
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The anti-government protests first erupted last summer as temperatures soared and millions were left without electricity.
