17 security officers 40 militants lose lives in Iraq clashes

(MENAFN- Arab News) RAMADI: The Islamic State group launched attacks on Iraqi bases in two western towns that left at least 17 members of the security forces and 40 militants dead security and medical sources said Thursday.

Seven policemen and four soldiers were killed when IS fighters attacked the police headquarters in the town of Heet while at least six members of federal forces were killed in an assault on a major army base in Ramadi.

In Heet a town on the Euphrates about 150 km west of Baghdad 25 gunmen attacked the police headquarters shortly after midnight.

'They smashed the gates open with suicide car bombs the 25 men tried to break into the HQ sparking heavy clashes' police colonel Jabbar Al-Nimrawi told AFP. 'The police killed 20 of them and the remaining five withdrew to the electricity building. They are still under siege they have sniper rifles' he said.

Nimrawi said the building was now surrounded by police army counter-terrorism elite troops and anti-terror Sunni tribal forces.

Doctor Nael Ahmed from Heet hospital said seven police officers and four soldiers were killed in the attack and the ensuing clashes.

In Ramadi less than 100 km west of Baghdad further down the Euphrates river a similar suicide unit attacked the 8th Brigade headquarters just outside the city on Wednesday. 'They attacked from three directions. They used suicide armored vehicles to break into the compound then 13 fighters with suicide vests entered' said senior army officer Awad Al-Dulaimi.

'We killed the last one at 5 a.m. (0200 GMT) after fierce exchanges. We also killed seven who had come from another direction' he said.

A doctor at Ramadi hospital Ahmed Al-Ani confirmed that he had received the bodies of three members of Iraq's elite counter-terrorism force including a colonel and three soldiers. Some of the last pockets still under government control in the Sunni province of Anbar are in Heet in Ramadi.

Meanwhile Iraqi Kurdish fighters on the front lines of battle say they have yet to receive the heavy weapons and training pledged by the United States and nearly a dozen other countries to help them push back the militants.

The exhausted Kurdish fighters leaned against a pair of antiquated green cannons on a hill overlooking this northern Iraqi village the ground around them littered with shrapnel from fierce battles with Islamic State militants.