Saudis among militants killed in Iraq

A report says two Saudi nationals, who have been among the Takfiri militants, are killed in clashes with Iraqi forces in the city of Samarra.

According to the Arabic language daily Sabq on Sunday, the killed militants were brothers, named Yahya and Ebrahim.

On Thursday, heavily armed militants from the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) entered the holy city from several directions. They used bulldozers to destroy a number of holy Shia shrines there, but faced counterattacks from the Iraqi army.

The father of the two Saudi militants said in an interview with the Saudi newspaper that he received an overseas phone call informing him of the deaths of his sons. The father further noted that his sons had gone to Syria to fight against the government of the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad before moving to Iraq.

Iraq’s elite counter-terrorism forces backed by helicopters launched a massive operation later in the day and drove the militants out of Samarra.