Dozens killed in Iraqi air force's friendly fire

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Iraqi air force mistakenly pounded a military position on Saturday, while dozens of civilians and soldiers killed in clashes and bomb attacks in Iraq, security sources said.

In Salahudin province, an Iraqi warplane pounded a military position by mistake near the town of Ouja, just 10 km south of the provincial capital city of Tikrit, leaving eight Shiite militiamen killed and 13 others wounded, a provincial security source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

The militiamen are part of dozens of thousands of Shiite volunteers who take up their arms to fight alongside the Iraqi security forces against the Islamic State (IS) militant group, an al-Qaida offshoot.

Also in the province, the IS militants late on Friday carried out an attack on the town of Dujail, just 60 km north of Baghdad from two directions, but was repelled by the security forces backed by Shiite militias in the early hours of Saturday, the source said without giving further details about casualties.

Eight people were killed and 24 others wounded when a car bomb parked on a roadside in the area of Mahmoudiyah, some 30 km south of Baghdad exploded Saturday evening, a police source said.

Two soldiers killed and five others wounded when IS gunmen attacked a security checkpoint in the Tarmiyah area, 30 km north of Baghdad, he added.

The security situation began to drastically deteriorate in Iraq since June 10 when bloody clashes broke out between Iraqi security forces and hundreds of IS militants, who took control of the country's northern city of Mosul and later seized swathes of territories after the Iraqi security forces abandoned their posts in Nineveh and other predominantly Sunni provinces.

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