TIKRIT, Iraq, April 4 (Xinhua) -- Hundreds of people suffer from diarrhea and colic admitted to hospitals during the past two days in Iraq's central province of Salahudin due to contamination of drinking water, medical sources said on Wednesday.

"The tests in the laboratories confirmed that drinking water from Tigris River was highly contaminated with fecal and intestinal bacteria," Mohammed al-Azzawi, deputy head of the medical center of the town of al-Alam, told Xinhua.

Mohammed al-Majid, head of provincial environment department, confirmed to Xinhua the contamination according to microbiological tests that his department conducted in the college of science in Tikrit University.

Al-Majid attributed the contamination to polluted water came from the north, where Nineveh's capital city of Mosul, which is widely believed that its sewers were open to the river with their water full of toxins and rotten bodies.

In mid-July 2017, Iraqi security forces liberated the city of Mosul, some 400 km north of Baghdad, from Islamic State (IS) militants after nine months of fierce battles that devastated large parts of the city and left thousands killed and wounded.