FILE - A US Army soldier guards a position at Camp Swift, northern Iraq, on September 8, 2016. Photo: AP via RSS

Iraqi security forces on Saturday launched an operation to clear the Islamic State (IS) militants from the rural areas in the eastern province of Diyala, the Iraqi military said.

A joint force from the Iraqi army, police, and paramilitary Hashd Shaabi brigades pushed into an agricultural area south of Diyala's provincial capital Baquba, some 65 km northeast of the capital Baghdad, to chase IS militants, Diyala's police command spokesman Nihad al-Mahdawi told Xinhua.

Meanwhile, Tahseen al-Khafaji, spokesman of the Iraqi Joint Operations Command, told the official Iraqi News Agency that the Iraqi forces "have been working for some time ... in the border areas with Syria by setting up towers and thermal cameras for surveillance to prevent the extremist militants from infiltrating from neighboring Syria."

IS militants are still active in the vast Anbar desert that stretches to the borders with Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, where IS remnants have been infiltrating Iraq across the border in an attempt to regroup in the country again.

The security situation in Iraq has been dramatically improved after Iraqi security forces fully defeated the extremist IS militants across the country late in 2017.