Iraqi forces recapture Ramadi bridge from IS

BAGHDAD: Iraqi security forces recaptured a key bridge from Islamic State militants in the capital of Anbar province on Friday said an Iraqi security official as the country's top Shiite cleric renewed calls for national unity among political rivals in the face of the Islamic militant threat.
Police colonel Mahdi Abbas said Iraqi security forces recaptured the Al-Houz bridge over the Euphrates river after fierce clashes with IS militants in western Ramadi.
Abbas said that the bridge was controlled by the IS group for several months and served as a primary supply route for the insurgents.
The security situation in Ramadi sharply deteriorated after the IS group seized three villages around the city forcing thousands to flee their homes. In recent days Iraqi soldiers and police have been able to secure the center of Ramadi and push the militants back from some areas of the city.
Meanwhile Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani on Friday urged the country's politicians to end all disputes in order to confront the political economic and security challenges facing the country.
'It is important that the brothers (the politicians) should come out with final and drastic solutions for the problems' said Al-Sistani's representative during a Friday sermon in Karbala.
In Friday's violence police officials said a bomb exploded near an outdoor market in the Sunni town of Tarmiyiah north of Baghdad killing four people and wounding eight.
A bomb near a courthouse killed three people and wounded nine in the town of Mahmoudiyah south of Baghdad.
Meanwhile the Islamic State shot down a regime aircraft near a key military airport in southern Syria Friday with pro-IS Twitter accounts saying the group had captured the pilot a monitor said.
The plane went down east of Khalkhalah airport the only air base in Sweida province a stronghold of the Druze minority that has largely avoided the bloodshed of Syria's war the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said the fate of any crew members remains unknown but pro-IS accounts claimed the pilot had been captured.
State television citing a military official said a aircraft 'crashed due to technical problems while completing a training exercise' near Khalkhalah and that the search for the pilot was ongoing.
In its first major attack in Sweida IS tried to storm the airport on April 11 but loyalist forces maintained control of it. Khalkhalah lies along a major highway between Damascus and the regime-held city of Sweida.
Friday's incident was not the first time IS has successfully downed a military aircraft.
In February it shot down a Jordanian warplane conducting air strikes on Syria as part of the international anti-IS coalition. Pilot Maaz Al-Kassasbeh was captured and subsequently burned alive.