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Dramatic footage has been released showing US and Kurdish special forces rescuing hostages from an ISIS compound .

The raid early on Thursday rescued 69 people being imprisoned in northern Iraq who were going to be executed and dumped in a mass grave.

One US commando was killed, named as Master Sgt Joshua Wheeler, who is the first American to die in ground combat with ISIS militants.

Four Kurds were wounded during the raid.

In the clip, a line of hostages are ushered out in dim light while heavy gunfire is heard.

Special forces then explore the compound and exchange further gunfire.

In the last bit of the footage, each of the hostages is searched.

According to Kurdish media, the raided facility was an estate or compound formerly owned by an Iraqi government judge.

The operation followed intelligence that Kurdish peshmerga fighters were being held in that compound, officials said.

However none of the captives freed by the raiders were in fact peshmerga, suggesting that Kurdish prisoners may have been moved by militants to another location, a Kurdish source added.

The freed detainees were Arabs and included around 20 members of the Iraqi security forces.

The others were local residents and Islamic State fighters that the group had accused of spying or treason, said US and Kurdish officials.

The prisoners were about to be executed and dumped in four mass graves, the official said.

Iraq's Defence Ministry said earlier on Friday it was not informed about the raid, which took place just north of the Islamic State-controlled town of Hawija.

"We just heard this from the media, we didn't know about it," ministry spokesman General Tahsin Ibrahim Sadiq told Reuters.

"It was just the peshmerga and the Americans, and the Ministry of Defence didn't have any idea about that."

The mission was the most significant raid against Islamic State in months.

A CIA spokesman declined to comment on the suggestion that the rescued hostages had connections to the US government.

But senior Iraqi Shi'ite politician Ayad Allawi said he suspected there must have been significant figures among the hostages to warrant a risky intervention by US special forces.

"I think this would have happened only if there were some useful assets," he said.

ISIS militants attacked Kurdish positions on the frontline in Gwer, south of the region's capital, overnight on Friday, after the raid.

An Islamic State statement circulated online by the group's supporters said "dozens" of peshmerga had been killed in the attack carried out by a suicide bomber.

But Qader Hassan, a peshmerga on the frontline, said only two people had been killed, and they belonged to an Iraqi army unit based there.

Some 62 peshmerga have gone missing in battle with the militants and several have been beheaded in Islamic State propaganda videos.

Islamic State holds hostages in detention centres across the sprawling lands it controls.

It also regularly executes people it accuses of spying for the Iraqi state or foreign powers.

According to Mosul Eye, a group documenting life in the Iraqi city, 455 people have been executed since the beginning of September.

The data - which has not been verified - details how one 63-year-old man, named as Karim Alumar, was beheaded after he blasphemed while being whipped for not closing his restaurant in time for prayers.

The report states: "During the execution of his whipping sentence, the man "blasphemed God and the Prophet", instantly he was sentenced to be beheaded, and immediately he was beheaded in front of a very large crowd of people at Bab Attoob."