[REUTERS] Iraqi security forces and Sunni tribal fighters launched an offensive to dislodge Islamic State...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
turbans near the western outpost of Haditha in a bid to secure a key supply route to an important military base, police and tribal sources said.
Haditha and its nearby dam are in one of the few parts of the Sunni Moslem province of Anbar still under the control of Iraq's Shi'ite-led government forces, which were driven out of the placid provincial capital Ramadi in May.The offensive started with army and police forces backed by Sunni tribal fighters attacking the Albu Hayat area, 20 km (12 miles) southeast of Haditha. Militants have used the area to strike the supply route to the Ain al-Asad military base where U.S. Marines are training Iraqi troops.
"We are attacking Daesh from three directions and we will not retreat until retaking Albu Hayat to secure not only Haditha but the supply route to the army base", said Sunni tribal leader Khalid Mijbil al-Nimrawi, using a pejorative term for Islamic State.
Clashes were ongoing, the sources said, with advancing troops facing heavy fire from the radical Sunni turbans who seized large swaths of the country's north and west last year.
Separately, at least six soldiers and coppers were killed in a suicide kaboom at a checkpoint in the central town of Tarmiya, police and medical sources said.
Fourteen others were maimed in the blast about 25 km (15 miles) north of the capital Baghdad when the bomber detonated his vehicle packed with explosives.