Baghdad (AFP) - Canada conducted airstrikes on Islamic State positions in Iraq for the first time on Sunday, while reports emerged that the jihadist group had executed more than 200 tribespeople in recent days.

"Today's strike demonstrates our government's firm resolve to tackle the threat of terrorism and to stand with our allies against ISIL's atrocities against innocent women, children and men," Canadian Defense Minister Rob Nicholson said in a statement.

Canada joined the anti-IS coalition on Thursday and conducted two days of reconnaissance before sending two CF-18s to attack jihadist positions around the city of Fallujah.

The attacks followed reports that IS had slaughtered scores of people from the Albu Nimr tribe, which had taken up arms against the insurgents.

Women and children were said to be among those executed over the past 10 days in western Iraq's Anbar province which has been largely over-run by IS.

Iraq is bracing for yet more violence in the coming days as hundreds of thousands of Shiites prepare to travel to shrines in Karbala for a major annual pilgrimage.

IS, a Sunni extremist group that has seized large parts of Iraq and Syria, is expected to target Ashura pilgrims, and 19 people died in attacks on Shiites on Sunday.

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- String of setbacks -

Accounts varied as to the number and timings of the executions in Anbar, but all sources spoke of more than 200 people murdered in recent days.

Police Colonel Shaaban al-Obaidi told AFP that more than 200 people were killed, while Faleh al-Essawi, deputy head of Anbar provincial council, put the toll at 258.

The killings are probably aimed at discouraging resistance from powerful local tribes in Anbar.

IS also detained dozens of members of the Jubur tribe in Salaheddin province, north of Baghdad, officials and a tribal leader said.

Jubur tribesmen and security forces have been holding out for months against IS in the provincial town of Dhuluiyah.

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Pro-government forces have suffered a string of setbacks in Anbar in recent weeks, prompting warnings that the province, which stretches from the borders with Jordan and Saudi Arabia to the western approach to Baghdad, could fall entirely.

Security forces who wilted before a lightning IS offensive in June are fighting to retake territory seized by the jihadists in Iraq's Sunni Arab heartland.

IS has declared an Islamic "caliphate" in territory it controls, imposing its harsh interpretation of sharia law and committing widespread atrocities.

Like other Sunni extremist groups, IS considers Shiites to be heretics and frequently attacks them, posing a major threat to the Ashura religious commemorations which peak on Tuesday and will be a major test for the new government headed by Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi.

Two car bombs targeting Shiites in Baghdad ahead of Ashura killed at least 19 people on Sunday, officials said, while a city centre car bombing near a police checkpoint killed at least five.

On the Syria-Turkey border, meanwhile, some 150 Iraqi peshmerga fighters were preparing to bolster fellow Kurds in battling IS for the town of Kobane, after crossing the frontier late on Friday.

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Syrian Kurdish refugees who fled the Syrian town of Ain al-Arab receive towels in a refugee camp in …

Syrian Kurdish militia have held off an IS offensive there for more than six weeks, and Kobane has become a crucial symbol in the anti-jihadist struggle.

- Coalition air strikes -

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, reported fierce clashes in the town's centre, north, south and Kurdish fighters shelling IS positions to its east.

Prior to Canada's airstrikes, the US-led coalition carried out at least three air raids near Kobane early on Sunday, according to the Observatory which relies on a wide network of sources inside the country.

At least 11 jihadists were killed in those strikes and fighting on Saturday, it said.

The Pentagon said five air strikes near Kobane on Saturday and Sunday hit five small IS units and destroyed three vehicles.

Canada declined to detail damage caused to the targets during its approximately four-hour mission. Details are expected at a news conference on Tuesday.

Canada's airstrikes come after a gunman whose name was on a terror watch list killed a soldier and attempted to storm Canada's parliament last month. The attack was one of two targeting Canadian soldiers just days apart.

Elsewhere in Syria, the Observatory said Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front seized a town and several villages in Idlib province late Saturday, in another blow to Western-backed rebels in the northwest.

It said Al-Nusra captured Khan al-Subul after the withdrawal of the Hazm movement, a moderate opposition group.

Al-Nusra also seized another five villages in Idlib held by Islamist and moderate rebel groups.

The advance comes a day after Al-Nusra seized the Idlib bastion of the Syria Revolutionaries Front, another Western-backed opposition group.

The advance of the Al-Qaeda affiliate is seen as a setback to US efforts to create and train a moderate rebel force as a counterweight to jihadists and the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The brutality of the Islamic State, which it's relying on to terrify Iraqi Sunnis into submission, continued with the recent murder of 322 captives, Iraqi officials say.

Iraqi officials upped the death toll of a massacre of Sunni Arab tribesmen by the self-styled Islamic State today to 322, making it among the largest massacres of civilians carried out by the group so far in its campaign to terrify Iraqi civilians and security forces from opposing the group.

Iraqi officials originally said that about 50 captive men and women from the Albu Nimr tribe were murdered by IS militants on Friday north of Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar province, as punishment for resisting the militants takeover of their hometown of Hit. Today Iraqi officialsupped the death toll.

The Islamic State has used tactics so brutal that many Iraqis have compared the group to Hulagu Khan, the grandson of Ghengis Khan who sacked Baghdad in 1258, killing tens of thousands of residents as punishment for the city's defiance and emptying so many of Baghdad's famed libraries into the Tigris River that legend had it a man or horse could walk across on them.

And for the same reason. During the group's return to prominence in Iraq this year, the place where it was founded, a fearsome reputation has been the group's best weapon - contributing to the Iraqi military's panicked retreat from the northern city of Mosul, abandoning US-supplied tanks and armored cars, ahead of the IS advance.

While IS has found support among many Iraqi Sunni Arabs, who complain of marginalization and human rights abuses at the hands of the Shiite Arab-dominated government in Baghdad, others in that community have tried to resist the Islamist army, not interested in accepting its harsh and fanatical version of Islam into their lives and remembering how brutally the group's predecessor, Al Qaeda in Iraq, treated their communities.

Over 5 years ago now, Sunni tribesmen elected to fight alongside US forces in Anbar and other provinces where Al Qaeda in Iraq was strong, in exchange for promises of payment and government jobs. After the US departed Iraq at the end of 2011, the Shiite government in Baghdad effectively negated those promises and targeted many of the Sunni Arab leaders of the fight against Al Qaeda as potential political rivals.

But even so, many Sunnis are ready to fight the group, since rebranded as the Islamic State, once more. But Baghdad's Shiite leaders remain wary of arming a group they view with hostility, even in service of defeating a shared enemy. Reuters quotes a leader of the Albu Nimr saying the government has ignored recent requests for help.

One of the leaders of the tribe, Sheikh Naeem al-Ga'oud, told Reuters that he had repeatedly asked the central government and army to provide his men with arms but no action was taken.

State television said on Sunday that Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi had ordered airstrikes on Islamic State targets around the town of Hit in response to the killings.

Officials at a government security operations command center in Anbar and civilians reached by Reuters said they had not heard of or witnessed airstrikes.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, addressed of lack of government support for Sunni tribes in Anbar, overwhelmingly Sunni Arab and just west of Baghdad, last week. He said US military advisers working alongside local tribes could do a lot of good in the fight against IS in the province, which IS currently has free reign in, but that Baghdad so far is standing in the way.

"The precondition for that is that the government of Iraq is willing to arm the tribes," Dempsey said at a press conference. "We have positive indications that they are, but (they) haven't begun to do it yet."

Meanwhile, it appears that Obama administration's approach to taking the fight to IS is going even worse in Syria than it is in Iraq. On Saturday Jabhat al-Nusra (JAN), a direct Al Qaeda affiliate unlike the independent Islamic State, ejected US-trained rebels from their last bastion in Syria's Idlib province. The Daily Telegraph reports that the rebels the US supported surrendered many weapons to the Al Qaeda affiliate.

It was not immediately clear if American TOW (anti-tank) missiles were among the stockpile surrendered to Jabhat al-Nusra on Saturday. However several Jabhat al-Nusra members on Twitter announced triumphantly that they were.

Also the loss of a group that had been held up to the international media as being exemplary of Western efforts in Syria is a humiliating blow at the time that the US is increasing its military involvement in the country, with both air strikes and training of local rebels.

In Idlib, Harakat Hazm gave up their positions to Jabhat al-Nusra "without firing a shot", according to some reports, and some of the men even defected to the jihadists.

The US had said earlier this year that pro-Western rebels like the ones defeated by JAN would prove important in Syria in the fight against both the jihadis and the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad they're seeking to destroy.

Jerusalem (AFP) - Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas has outraged Israeli leaders by calling the attempted assassin of a Jewish ultra-rightwing rabbi a "martyr" and the soldiers who killed him "terrorist gangs".

Abbas on Sunday sent a letter of condolence to the family of 32-year-old Muataz Hijazi, killed by Israeli police who said he had tried to murder Yehuda Glick.

The US-born Glick, who was seriously wounded in the shooting attack, is an ultranationalist whose demand that Jews be allowed to pray at the Al-Aqsa compound in east Jerusalem outrages Muslims.

The compound -- which Jews call the Temple Mount -- is the third holiest site in Islam and regarded as the holiest in Judaism as the location of the first and second temples.

In his letter, which AFP has seen, Abbas expressed his "anger and condemnation after news of the criminal, despicable assassination by the Israeli occupation army's terrorist gangs of Muataz Ibrahim Khalil Hijazi, who died a martyr defending the rights of our people and the holy places".

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a statement released late on Sunday, condemned the Palestinian leader's remarks.

"While we are trying to calm the situation, Abu Mazen (Abbas) sends his condolences on the death of a man who tried to commit a despicable act," he said.

The Israelis and Palestinians accuse each other of fanning the flames over east Jerusalem, the occupied Arab sector of the Holy City conquered by the Jewish state in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed.

Glick was leaving a debate on the status of the flashpoint compound late last Wednesday when he was shot by a man Israeli police said was Hijazi.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said the letter of condolences to Hijazi's family showed that Abbas was "a partner of terrorism, terrorists and murderers".

Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, a cabinet moderate who was Israel's chief negotiator in abortive US-brokered peace talks with the Palestinians, told public radio that Abbas was "playing with fire".

"You can't on the one hand go round saying you condemn violence and on the other hand send letters encouraging it," she said.

Beirut (AFP) - Islamic State group jihadists beheaded eight Syrian rebels who had surrendered in a town on the border with Iraq last week despite pledges of an amnesty, a monitor said Monday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the men were executed and their bodies hung on makeshift crucifixes in Albu Kamal in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor.

"The men surrendered in Albu Kamal because the Islamic State had offered amnesty to people who fought them if they turned themselves in," Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

Instead, he said, the eight opposition fighters were beheaded and then hung from crosses in a method often employed by the jihadist group.

The monitor, which relies on a large network of sources on the ground in Syria, said the men had belonged to a group that had fought against both the Syrian regime and the Islamic State.

Meanwhile, in the city of Deir Ezzor, the provincial capital, IS jihadists decapitated another three men, also hanging their corpses from crosses, the Observatory said.

The group said it was unclear when the executions took place, adding that two of the men were accused of collaboration with the Syrian regime and the third of fighting against the Islamic State.

IS has declared a so-called Islamic "caliphate" in the territory it controls in Syria and Iraq, imposing its extreme interpretation of Islam and executing opponents.