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Top Islamic State commander among 70 militants killed in air strikes

More than 50,000 people remain in the centre of the Sunni majority city, which has been under control of the extremist group for more than two years.

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Earlier on Friday, the Iraqi military said that it had managed to evacuate 65 families, mostly women and children, from the eastern outskirts of the city.

The radical group of Islamic State (ISIS) has executed five of its own militant fighters for escaping the battlefront in Fallujah, where clashes are ongoing between ISIS and the Iraqi army, local activists reported on Friday.

Civilians trapped in the Iraqi city of Fallujah face mounting threats as humanitarian conditions worsen and Iraqi forces accelerate their offensive to oust the Islamic State, local and foreign officials said on Thursday.

“Saving an innocent human from harm is more important and greater than targeting the enemy”, his representative, Ahmed al-Safi, said in a sermon at a mosque in the holy city of Karbala, according to independent website Alsumaria News.

He added that the Iraqi government had dropped leaflets on the city of 150,000 people, asking citizens to put white sheets on their houses while the government works on evacuation routes.

US-led coalition supporting Iraqi forces have surrounded Fallujah and carried out 20 strikes over the past four days.

IS prevented them from leaving, and “gave us food that only animals would eat”, Umm Omar said.

NRC said only 249 families (around 1,500 people) they knew of had managed to flee the Fallujah area since the launch of military operations almost a week ago.

Iraqi military officials insisted that safe corridors would be established to allow civilians to flee, but residents said ISIL checkpoints along the city’s main roads have made escape almost impossible.

Police Lieutenant General Raed Shakir Jawdat said: ‘Our forces evacuated 460 people. a lot of them women and children’.

Across the border, IS’s de-facto Syrian capital Raqa was also coming under increasing pressure.

The operation was launched after a very turbulent month in Baghdad.

Warren said not much was really known about al-Bilawi’s background.

“People are afraid of a brutal onslaught from the warplanes, whether coalition, Russian, or even regime”, he told AFP.

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Jasim al-Halbusi, a member of the Anbar provincial council’s security committee, said militants erected blast walls on one of the bridges leading out of the city to keep people in.

U.S., allies target Islamic State in Falluja, Mosul: coalition