The US-led coalition against Islamic State militants on Tuesday carried out what Iraqi security officials said were its “most intense raids” on jihadist positions around the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.
The raids came after Iraqi officials said they received information that the jihadists were planning to launch a major attack on the city, at the centre of one of the country’s main oil-producing areas.
Kurdish news site Bas News on Monday quoted a local commander in Kirkuk as saying that the Islamic State had moved heavy weaponry into the area.
Further strikes were reported on the city of Hit, in western al-Anbar province, where the jihadists captured a military base on Monday.
The advance there threatens to cut off remaining security forces in the Sunni-dominated province, which stretches from the western outskirts of Baghdad to the Syrian border.
The US-led coalition was also in action in Syria, striking four local oil refineries in the Islamic State-controlled eastern province of Deir al-Zour, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
In northern Syria, air raids continued on and around the besieged Kurdish town of Kobane, on the border with Turkey.
A senior local official told dpa that the raids had allowed Kurdish defenders to retake a strategic hill four kilometres west of the town, the eastern half of which is under jihadist control.
Meanwhile, Syrian regime planes continued intense strikes on rebel-held areas around Damascus and in central Syria, the Britain-based Observatory said.
The raids on the rebel-held eastern outskirts of Damascus killed 17 people and injured dozens, the group said.
“So far in the past 24 hours we have registered some 100 raids by the regime planes on rebel-held areas across Syria,” the Observatory’s Rami Abdel Rahman told dpa.
US President Barack Obama is to discuss the US-led coalition’s strategy to counter the Islamic State with 20 military leaders on Tuesday.
A joint mission to train moderate Syrian rebels will be one of the topics under discussion at the first such meeting since the coalition first launched airstrikes on IS positions in neighbouring Iraq in early August.
GNA
