Incoming Daesh car bombs stopped by anti tank missiles

(MENAFN- Arab News) BAGHDAD: Government forces and Shiite militiamen repelled two Daesh attacks in Anbar province on Saturday officials said. In one attack they used anti-tank missiles to stop four would-be suicide car bombers.
Police and military officials said Daesh militants attacked the government-held town of Husseiba with heavy mortar fire early Saturday. They say the attackers retreated after an hours-long battle leaving behind three destroyed vehicles and five dead fighters. At least 10 troops and militiamen were wounded in the clash.
Iraqi forces took Husseiba near the militant-held provincial capital of Ramadi from Daesh last month.
The officials said that elsewhere in Anbar province Iraqi troops using Russian anti-tank Kornet missiles destroyed four incoming suicide car bombs during an IS attack in the Tharthar area.
Iraqi forces backed by Shiite militias have been struggling to recapture areas lost to Daesh in the country's west and north.
Meanwhile police said a bomb exploded at a commercial street in the Taji area just north of Baghdad killing two people and wounding five others. Another bomb blast near several shops killed three people and wounded eight others in the capital's southern suburbs.
In an emphatic defense of the air war in Iraq and Syria a senior American general fired back at critics who call the campaign timid and ineffective saying bombs have tied down Daesh men without killing large numbers of civilians.
In a news conference he said was called to counter misconceptions about the use of air power in an unconventional war Air Force Lt. Gen. John W. Hesterman III asserted that pilots are killing more than 1000 militants a month while avoiding civilian casualties and Iraqi government forces.
'The thought that we're observing large numbers of Daesh terrorists and not killing them anywhere is fiction' he said using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State which has defied nearly a year of daily US airstrikes to maintain a hold on large swaths of northern and western Iraq and eastern Syria.
'We kill them wherever we find them' the general said.
Hesterman leads US Central Command's air forces and the coalition air campaign. He spoke by telephone to reporters at the Pentagon from his headquarters at Al-Udeid air base in Qatar.