At least 28 people were killed and 44 others wounded in battles with Islamic State (IS) militants and in car bomb attacks across Iraq Monday, security source said.
In the western province of Anbar, dozens of IS militants attacked an army headquarters near the village of Majjara, near Habbaniyah Lake southwest of the militant-seized city of Fallujah, some 50 km west of Iraq's capital Baghdad, a provincial security source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
The troops, backed by aircraft, fought back the militants and forced them to withdraw after reinforcements arrived at the scene, the source said.
The heavy clashes resulted in the killing of 18 soldiers and the destroying of several military vehicles, the source said, without giving details about the casualties among the attackers.
Separately, a suicide bomber blew up his explosives-laden vehicle near a checkpoint manned by Sahwa paramilitary group members on a bridge over the Euphrates river near the town of al-Baghdadi, some 200 km northwest of Baghdad, destroying part of the bridge and wounding four of the Sahwa members, the source said.
The Sahwa group, also known as the Awakening Council or the Sons of Iraq, consists of armed groups, including some powerful anti-US Sunni insurgent groups, who turned their guns against the Al Qaida network after the latter exercised indiscriminate killings against both Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities.
Meanwhile, another suicide bomber rammed his explosives-laden car into an army checkpoint just west of al-Baghdadi town, killing three soldiers and wounding four others, the source said.
Since December last year, insurgent attacks have continued in the Sunni Arab heartland west of Baghdad that stretches through Anbar province, which has been the scene of fierce clashes that flared up after Iraqi police dismantled an anti-government protest site outside the city of Ramadi.
Earlier in the day, a police source told Xinhua that a total of seven people were killed and 36 others wounded in two car bomb explosions in Baghdad.
One of the attacks in Baghdad occurred around noon, in which a booby-trapped car was detonated at a thoroughfare in Mashtal neighbourhood in the capital, leaving four people dead and 24 others injured, the source said on condition of anonymity.
Also in Baghdad, another car bomb went off in Ameriyah neighborhood in the western part of the capital, killing three people and wounding 12 others, the source said.
The security situation in Iraq began to drastically deteriorate June 10, when bloody clashes broke out between the Iraqi security forces and the IS group who took control of the country's northern province of Nineveh and later seized swathes of territories after Iraqi security forces abandoned their posts in other predominantly Sunni provinces.
