JALAWLA - Kurdish Peshmerga forces and jihadi fighters of the Islamic State (IS) exchanged artillery fire in the ethnically-mixed town of Jalawla north of Baghdad Friday evening, reportedly killing at least two militants and wounding 10.
Shortly before the clashes, a roadside bomb targeted a vehicle of the local branch of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), injuring two Peshmergas and three civilians.
Meanwhile, Ali Muhammad Shaswar, head of the Garmiyan security department, said that a bomb went off in the center of Jalawla on Saturday, but there were no casualties. “We suspect that the Islamic State was behind this blast, to spread fear among the town residents,” he said.
And Iraqi anti-terrorism forces said that Islamic State leader Abubakir al-Baghdadi had been hurt in an airstrike Thursday in the town of Qaim in Anbar, Iraq’s largest province which is entirely in insurgent hands. Sabah Numan, spokesman of the anti-terrorism forces, told the media that many IS leaders had been wounded in the air raid.
That air attack came as the Sunni jihadis demolished Shiite shrines and mosques in the north, and posted photos online of the destruction.
Government forces continued a push to retake the city of Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein. Army commanders claimed to have pushed deep into the city, but residents said Tikrit was still in rebel hands.
The crisis in Iraq took another turn for the worse, after the widely-opposed Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki defiantly declared Friday that he was not desisting from a third term, even as Iraq splintered: the Kurds are working on a date for a referendum to break away from Iraq and declare independence.
In Jalawla, a Rudaw correspondent on the scene said that IS fighters launched an attack to advance into the town at around 5 pm on Friday, but were driven back by Peshmerga artillery fire. The exchange lasted about three hours and killed at least two IS fighters and wounded around 10, a Peshmerga source said.
Jalawla was until recently part of the so-called “disputed territories” in northern Diyala province, but after the withdrawal of Iraqi troops earlier this month Kurdish forces moved in to protect the town’s Kurdish population.
Jalawla is the only place along Kurdistan’s border with Iraq where any major fighting has taken place between the Peshmerga and IS.
The fighting took place in the Tajnid sector of town that is home to 2,000 families. Before the outbreak of recent hostilities, the district was under the control of the Iraqi army.
Most of Jalawla is under the control of Kurdish Peshmerga now, but Tajnid is still in IS hands.
The IS and the Kurdish Peshmerga have preserved a kind of undeclared truce across the new borders between the Kurdistan Region and areas controlled by the jihadis, since huge territorial advances that have seen the Iraqi army collapse and a third of the country fall into insurgent hands.
A Peshmerga commander said that Kurdish forces were not trying to advance into Tajnid, but that the Sunni jihadis are fighting to take over Jalawla and other villages north of Diyala because of their proximity to the Iranian border, hoping to cut off that part of the country from Shiite Iran.
