Islamic State beheads opposition fighters in Damascus Partial gains at Ramadi as over 114,000 flee fighting

BAGHDAD: Iraq security forces recaptured areas lost earlier to the Islamic State group in and around the battleground city of Ramadi, security officials said on Tuesday.

Police Major Omar Al-Alawni said that government forces regained control of the city’s Pediatric and Maternity Hospital and the surrounding neighborhood late Monday night after fierce clashes with IS militants. The hospital is located about 500 meters from a complex of government offices.

Police Col. Mahdi Abbas said Iraqi troops were engaged in intense clashes Tuesday in an offensive to regain control of Soufiya, one of three villages that fell into the hands of the Islamic State group last week.

Both officials said the battles turned in favor of government forces after the arrival of reinforcements and weapons from Baghdad. At least 12 militants were killed in the clashes overnight, they said.

Footage obtained by The Associated Press showed military black Humvees advancing in a residential area in Ramadi and Iraqi soldiers firing their rifles while taking shelter behind a wall.

The security situation in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, sharp- ly deteriorated after IS seized Soufiya and two other villages, Sjariyah and Albu-Ghanim, forcing thousands of civilians to flee their homes.

More than 114,000 people have fled fighting over the past two weeks in the Ramadi area, the United Nations said Tuesday, expressing concern over the mounting problems faced by the displaced.

The UN refugee agency said of the total number, about 8,000 remained in the western province of Anbar.

“Some 54,000 have gone to Baghdad, 15,000 to Sulaymaniyah in the Kurdistan region of Iraq and 2,100 people have fled to Babylon,” UN refugee agency spokesman Adrian Edwards said.

He said the others were on the move and about 900 had reached Diyala, an ethnically and religiously mixed province northeast of Baghdad.

At least 2.7 million people have been displaced in Iraq since the beginning of 2014, including almost 400,000 from Anbar, according to the United Nations.

The UNHCR said

it was “con- cerned about the difficulties facing thousands of Iraqi civilians” fleeing fighting between pro-government forces and the Islamic State group.

These included “dwindling resources, checkpoints, entry restrictions and security procedures to navigate on their journeys to safety,” Edwards said.

“People waiting on the Anbar side have no shelter and face worsening conditions. The newly displaced are exhausted and anxious to move on to more secure locations,” he said, adding that some had “walked miles without food or water.”

Meanwhile, the Islamic State group beheaded overnight two opposition fighters accused of fighting the extremist group in a southern Damascus suburb, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said Tuesday.

“IS executed two men in south Damascus by beheading” after they were accused of being traitors, the Britain-based Observatory said.

Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP IS had kidnapped the fighters from Qadam, a Damascus neighborhood, and beheaded them in Hajar Al-Aswad, a suburb of the capital.