A commander of the Kurdish Peshmerga forces has been killed in a roadside bomb attack south of the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

Lieutenant Colonel Ismail Hamid said on Tuesday that the explosion occurred when Major General Salah Dilmani was touring the Peshmerga front against the ISIL Takfiri group in the village of Atshana village located in the region of Daquq south of Kirkuk.

The blast “led to his martyrdom and that of three of his bodyguards,” said Peshmerga Colonel Burhan Sheikha, adding that five other people suffered injuries in the explosion.

Dilmani was the commander of the 118th brigade of the Peshmerga forces, Sheikha added.

The development comes as Kurdish fighters have extended their control over a large territory north of Iraq after pushing the ISIL terrorists further away from the strategic city of Kirkuk.

Iraq’s Kurdish Peshmerga fighters take part in a graduation ceremony at the Kurdistan Training Coordination Center in Erbil, Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, April 16, 2015. © AFP

“We are repelling ISIL’s advance here. These are Kurdish regions, but we are not occupying forces, but...defensive units protecting all the different religious and ethnic groups living here,” Saleh Amine, a field commander of Peshmerga forces, told Press TV on April 30.

With the battles raging on in the western province of Anbar and the mop-up operations by the Iraqi security forces going on in the northern province of Salahuddin, Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga forces are apparently making use of these conditions to further tighten the noose on ISIL militants in regions south of Kirkuk.

ISIL launched an offensive in Iraq in June last year and took control of Mosul, before sweeping through parts of the country’s heartland.

IA/MKA