Besieged Daesh kills hundreds

BAGHDAD — Daesh militants rounded up and massacred 284 people as Iraqi-led forces closed in on Mosul, the group’s last stronghold in Iraq, CNN reported on Saturday.

Those killed in the last two days had been used as human shields against attacks on the southern sections of Mosul, the news channel quoted an Iraqi intelligence source as saying.

The report said the Daesh dumped the corpses in a mass grave at the defunct College of Agriculture in northern Mosul. It said the victims — some of them children — were all shot.

In Kirkuk, city police chief said Iraqi security forces killed 48 of the gunmen who stormed parts of the city in a shock attack.

Brigadier General Khattab Omar Aref said some of them blew themselves up when the security forces cornered them.

Special counter-terrorism and intelligence units were hunting down some of the dozens of Daesh fighters who stormed public buildings on Friday.

KIRKUK — Iraqi security forces have killed 48 of the gunmen who stormed parts of Kirkuk in a shock attack claimed by the Daesh group, the city’s police chief said.

“Forty-eight Daesh terrorists have been killed in the clashes,” Brigadier General Khattab Omar Aref told reporters, adding that some of them blew themselves up when the security forces cornered them. Special counter-terrorism and intelligence units were hunting down some of the dozens of the Daesh fighters who stormed public buildings on Friday.

Clashes have been taking place almost uninterrupted since and the city, which lies some 240km north of Baghdad, remains under curfew. A senior interior ministry official said that at least 46 other people had been killed in the Daesh raid and ensuing clashes, mostly members of the security forces.

“The security forces control the situation now but there are still pockets of fighters in some southern and eastern neighbourhoods,” Aref said. “We have foiled this large Daesh plot, which was to take control of government buildings, including security headquarters,” he said.

“They were denied just like they are being defeated on the outskirts of Mosul,” police chief said, in reference to the offensive by Iraqi forces to wrest back the city of Mosul, Daesh’s last major stronghold in Iraq.