RAMADI (Iraq): Violence in Iraq killed 29 people on Saturday, most of them militants who died in a security forces assault that pushed them out of an area west of Baghdad, officials said.

Anti-government fighters have held shifting parts of Anbar provincial capital Ramadi and all of the city of Fallujah, both west of Baghdad, for more than three months, with security forces still struggling to bring parts of the province back under government control.

Early on Saturday, security forces assaulted the Al-Hamira area south of Ramadi, retaking it from militants, an army colonel and a police lieutenant colonel said. The fighting killed 21 militants and two soldiers, the officers said.

The crisis in the desert province of Anbar erupted in late December when security forces dismantled Iraq’s main Sunni Arab anti-government protest camp just outside Ramadi.

Militants subsequently seized parts of Ramadi and all of Fallujah, the first time anti-government forces have exercised such open control in major cities since the peak of the deadly violence that followed the US-led invasion of 2003.—AFP