The army killed more than 279 terrorists of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and destroyed 50 of the group’s vehicles within 24 hours, military spokesman Qassim Ata said in a televised news conference on Sunday.
The security situation is improving and government forces are conducting pre-emptive operations in Baghdad, he said.
Army helicopters were attacking Tikrit every four hours trying to dislodge the foreign-backed terrorists from the hometown of the late dictator Saddam Hussein, said Dawoud Salman, a resident of the city 80 miles (130km) north of Baghdad, who runs a dairy distributing company.
Some political experts say the unrest in Iraq has its roots in the US-led invasion of the Arab state since 2003.
Extremists’ forums and social-media sites were filled with claims that ISIL terrorists had executed 1,700 people they described as apostates.
The claims, which couldn’t be independently verified, were accompanied by photos of the purported mass shootings carried out by ISIL terrorists. The photos recalled some of the footage from the foreign-hatched war in Syria, where nearly160,000 people have been killed, many of them civilians.
NTJ/MB