BAGHDAD/RAMADI/GENEVA: Daesh (ISIS) fighters seized areas around Ramadi, west of Baghdad, Wednesday in an apparent attempt at a diversion from offensives on its last Iraqi footholds but were swiftly defeated, security sources said.

The report came as the top U.N. human rights official said he was “appalled” that the Iraqi government had hanged 42 men Sunday, almost certainly without a fair trial, and that he feared more would follow. The militant infiltrators briefly occupied three areas near the city, which is the capital of mainly Sunni Arab Anbar province, long a bastion of insurgency, the sources said.

But after several hours of heavy fighting in which there were deaths on both sides, all three areas were retaken. “The security forces and the tribes retook control of the Al-Tash, Majr and Kilometer Seven districts,” provincial police chief Maj. Gen. Hadi Razij Kassar told reporters. “All the Daesh members were killed,” he added.

The operation was likely to have been an attempt to divert the security forces from an offensive they launched last week against the extremists’ last two footholds in Iraq, one of them a series of towns further up the Euphrates Valley from Ramadi.

A general who asked not to be identified told AFP government forces had killed 20 militants.

A military source in Ramadi hospital said two security personnel were killed and 18 civilians wounded. “A curfew has been imposed on the city of Ramadi and its surroundings to prevent any security breaches,” the general said.

Troops and paramilitaries retook full control of Ramadi from Daesh in February 2016 but are still battling to clear the group from elsewhere in Anbar province.

The militant group remains in control of a pocket north of Baghdad, Hawija, and a stretch of land across the Syrian-Iraqi border, where Iraqi forces launched offensives this month supported by a U.S.-led international coalition.

Troops and paramilitaries have retaken the town of Sharqat in their drive on Hawija. They have also recaptured a string of villages around the town of Anna in their push up the Euphrates Valley toward the Syrian border.

Separately, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein decried the “mass hanging” of 42 prisoners at an Iraqi prison. The executed prisoners had been convicted of terrorism charges including killing members of the security forces and detonating car bombs.

“I am appalled to learn of the execution of 42 prisoners in a single day,” Zeid said in a statement. “We are extremely concerned at reports that Iraq may be planning to expedite the process of executing prisoners already sentenced to death, and that this could result in more large-scale executions in the coming weeks.”

Zeid said it was “extremely doubtful” that strict due process and fair trial guarantees, including the men’s rights to effective legal assistance and a full appeals process as well as to seek pardon or commutation of their sentence, had been met in every one of the 42 individual cases.

The hangings came after suicide attacks killed at least 60 people near the southern city of Nassiriya, a Shiite area, on Sept. 14, prompting Shiite demands for tougher judicial action. Iraqi officials have said that about 1,200 of the estimated 6,000 prisoners held in Nassiriya have been sentenced to death, the statement said.