Agencies :Fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have mounted two suicide car-bomb attacks aimed at security checkpoints at the main entrance into Haditha city.Haditha, in Iraq’s western Anbar province, is currently mostly under the control of the government, with troops and tribesmen holding about 70 percent of the city.ISIL, however, is in control of areas that are in the direction of the border with Syria.Saturday’s attacks left at least 12 people dead and 17 more injured, medical sources told Al JAzeera.Nine policemen and three civilians were among the dead, the sources said.ISIL fighters also shot down an Iraqi military helicopter on Saturday, officials said, killing the two pilots onboard and raising fresh concerns about the group’s ability to attack aircraft amid ongoing US-led coalition airstrikes.The attack happened in the Shia holy city of Samarra, about 95 kilometres north of Baghdad, the AP news agency reported.A senior Defence Ministry official told the agency the Sunni fighters used a shoulder-fired rocket launcher to shoot down the EC635 helicopter on the outskirts of the city.ISIL fighters overnight on Friday took control of a different area of Anbar province. Al Jazeera’s Jane Arraf, reporting from Baghdad, said ISIL took over the village of al-Jabha just after midnight.The village is about 12km west of Ramadi.Our correspondent said ISIL immediately sent out messages from loudspeakers in the mosques telling residents that if they did not fight back, they would be safe.”ISIL made clear that they are fighting to regain the corridor between tribes that have turned against ISIL and the military command operation centre in Ramadi,” Al Jazeera’s Arraf said.”There was fierce fighting across Anbar. ISIL has taken over more than a dozen villages in the past few days. Residents there say its clear ISIL is making gains there, prompting desperate calls, including from the provisional council head, for foreign troops to come and help them.”Meanwhile, Syrian rebels using improvised mortar bombs made of cooking gas canisters killed 311 civilians between July and December this year, a monitoring group said on Friday, condemning the use of the wildly inaccurate weapons.Two-thirds of the deaths, or 203 people, were in the northern city of Aleppo where the so-called “hell cannons” have been fired on government-held districts of Syria’s second city.The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the violence using sources on both sides, said that 42 children and 25 women were among the dead in Aleppo. It said more than 700 people had also been wounded during that time.
