Kurdish forces

Hundreds of Peshmerga fighters, backed by artillery and US-led coalition air strikes, advanced on Bashiqa from three directions on Monday morning.

By late afternoon, they were moving from house to house clearing the town, a Peshmerga statement said.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi military said it had found a mass grave filled with some 100 decapitated bodies south of Mosul.

The grave was located in the grounds of an agricultural college on the outskirts of the town of Hamam al-Alil, which troops entered over the weekend.

Wyatt Roy, a former assistant minister and Australia's youngest ever MP, lost his seat in the July election.

He travelled to the front line of the conflict between the Islamic State group and Kurdish forces, in defiance of travel warnings, to "see a mate".

Five IS fighters were reported to have been killed last week in the battle, west of Mosul.

IS fire fight

Mr Roy said he was at the frontline "for no more than a minute" when 15 IS fighters fired a series of 50-calibre rounds and RPGs from less than 1km away.

Kurdish activist Mustafa Bali, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Kurdish official Idris Naasan put at 40-50 the number of elite IS fighters killed in the two days of fighting since the militants sneaked into the town of Kobani before dawn on Thursday.

Clashes, however, continued to the south and west of the predominantly Kurdish town on the Turkish border on Saturday, they said, although the fighting in the south quietened down by nightfall.