Brigadier General Safin Abdulmajid, the Kurdish commander of 10th Division of Iraqi Army, was killed Thursday in Anbar province in a vehicle-borne suicide attack by the Islamic State.
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They said the bomber drove his explosives-laden vehicle into the advancing troops north of Anbar’s provincial capital, IS-held Ramadi, killing the two generals and three soldiers.
Gen Abdel Rahman Abu Ragheef was the deputy commander of operations in the strategically important province of Anbar, while Brig Safeen Abdel Majeed was a divisional commander.
Thursday’s attack came as government forces and allied militiamen are coming under mounting pressure from IS militants in the oil refinery town of Beiji, north of Baghdad.
But progress has been slow and both sides have been suffering heavy casualties in the fight for Anbar.
The battle to recapture Ramadi is being led by the military and the police, supported by Shia militias, Sunni tribal fighters and US-led coalition air strikes. A military spokesman said on state television that 10 other soldiers were wounded.
Backed by a year-long U.S.-led campaign of airstrikes, Iraqi government forces have struggled to make significant gains in rooting out the Islamic State fighters, who control wide swaths of Iraq and Syria.
On Sunday, another senior army officer was injured in clashes near Ramadi. Ramadi was seized in March after Iraqi forces withdrew in the face of a numerically smaller ISIS force.
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But Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi responded by saying that he was surprised at the US defence secretary’s comments and that Ramadi would soon be recaptured.
