ISIS Militants Killed in US Airstrikes, Officials Say

The U.S. -led coalition said Thursday that they also conducted airstrikes on “two large concentrations of Daesh vehicles and fighters”, according to spokesman Col. Christopher Garver.

“Most of them were foreign fighters who refused to surrender to our forces” during the Fallujah operation, Lieutenant General Hamed Al-Maliki said. The ministry of defense released aerial footage showing dozens of vehicles being taken out.

The rare concentration of Islamic State vehicles was spotted east of Ramadi moving westward when it was hit by a barrage of airstrikes from US and Iraqi aircraft, defense officials said.

A terrorist convoy of more than 700 vehicles began moving out of Hassi at 1:20 a.m. Wednesday and was attacked by Iraqi helicopter gunships, destroying more than 130 vehicles, and killing “tens” of Daesh terrorists, Iraqi Army aviation commander, Gen.

“We estimate Coalition strikes destroyed approximately 120 Da’esh vehicles”, Garver said.

On the battlefield, the USA -led campaign against Islamic State has moved up a gear in recent weeks, with the government declaring victory over the group in Fallujah.

The Islamic State group flag flying over Iraq’s Fallujah is in tatters and its fighters are dead or gone, leaving behind a broken city of bomb-rigged buildings and empty streets.

Iraq secured a deal Wednesday for a $2.7 billion USA loan to finance the buying of ammunition and maintenance of tanks and fighters used in the fight against the Islamic State group.

A US official said USA planes conducted a precision strike on a multi-truck convoy leaving a southern suburb of Falluja.

The strikes – which the Iraqi government said took place from Wednesday to Thursday – compounded what was already a major defeat for the jihadists. Garver said US and Iraqi airstrikes destroyed upward of 120 Islamic State vehicles. In the summer of 2014, IS militants blitzed across large swaths of the country’s north and west, capturing Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul and the majority of the western Anbar province.

Medical officials confirmed the casualty figures.

“IS are masters at going to ground and living to fight another day”, Rabkin said, adding that while the Iraqi military has learned to recapture towns and cities from IS, the extremists will continue to be a threat once they go underground.

Garver estimated that the vehicles destroyed by coalition forces could have carried as many as 250 militants. The West has repeatedly accused Moscow of also bombing moderate opposition groups and civilians, a claim which Russian Federation strongly denies.

The United Nations said Iraqi authorities will allow civilians displaced by the assault on Islamic State-held Falluja to start returning home as early as August.