The Takfiri terrorists which still controls the northern Iraqi city, "attacked a peshmerga post in Zumar (on Friday) and a fierce battle erupted," Kurdish sources affiliated with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) were quoted as saying Saturday in an AFP report.

They said 14 peshmerga fighters were killed, a toll confirmed by a senior officer in the Kurdish force.

The PUK official said the peshmerga killed "around 100" ISIL fighters and captured 38 in a battle that lasted several hours.

Zumar is a small Kurdish-majority outpost northwest of Mosul, which used to be under federal government control but was taken over by the peshmerga in June.

ISIL terrorists, who had already been running large swathes of neighboring Syria, launched a blistering offensive on June 9 that saw them capture Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, and a number of other towns in central Iraq. 

Many Iraqi government forces retreated in the face of the foreign-backed onslaught, and peshmerga troops seized the opportunity to fill the vacuum and seize long-coveted areas the Kurds were in dispute with Baghdad over.

Iraqi government have repeatedly declared that Saudi Arabia, Qatar are among the regional countries funding and supporting ISIL and other terrorist in the country.

This is while the PUK forces is known to have engaged in a number of terrorist attacks against Iraq, Turkey and Iran and is reportedly allied with Iraq’s Kurdistan regional government.

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