Eight people were killed and nearly 20 wounded on Monday in two separate car bomb blasts that hit police checkpoints in Falluja, a former stronghold of Islamic State west of Baghdad, police sources said.
A suicide attack in an oasis town south of Baghdad killed eight people and wounded at least six on Monday, Iraqi officials said.
The Iraqi military said Sunday that soldiers south of Mosul have recaptured the Nimrud area, home to the site of an ancient Assyrian city that was blown up by the Islamic State group.
Iraqi Kurdish forces came under heavy fire from a salmon-coloured house on the edge of the Islamic State group-held town of Bashiqa, but when they stormed it, it was empty.
Families fleeing Mosul as Iraqi forces move in are taking their ‘official’ documents with them but also wondering who will recognise the stamp of the Islamic State group.
Islamic State fighters have abducted 295 former Iraqi Security Forces members near Mosul and forced 1,500 families to retreat with them from the town of Hammam al Alil towards Mosul airport, U.N. human rights spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said on Tuesday.
Iraqi forces retook a key town from the Islamic State group Monday, a crucial objective on the southern front of the offensive to wrest back the city of Mosul.
Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga forces attacked an Islamic State-held town northeast of Mosul on Monday, trying to clear a pocket of militants outside the city while Iraqi troops wage a fierce urban war with the jihadists in its eastern neighbourhoods.
US-backed Kurdish-Arab forces launched an offensive Sunday on the Islamic State group's de facto Syrian capital Raqa, upping pressure on the jihadists who are already battling Iraqi troops in Mosul.
At least 27 people were killed on Sunday in a series of suicide bombings, including one where an ambulance was used, which were claimed by Islamic State in Iraq's northern province of Salah al-Din.
A suicide attacker detonated an ambulance packed with explosives in Tikrit on Sunday, killing nine people at the southern entrance to the city, police and hospital sources said.
Iraq announced on Tuesday that its forces had entered jihadist-held Mosul for the first time since the Islamic State group overran the city more than two years ago.
