All 46 Indian nurses abducted from Tikrit in strife-torn Iraq were released by ISIS militants on Friday. The development came as a rare piece of positive news amid a bloody war raged by the Sunni insurgents.

The nurses will fly back to Kerala on Saturday morning, IANS quoted chief minister Oommen Chandy as saying.

Chandy told the news agency over telephone from New Delhi that an Air India flight will depart from the Indian capital on Friday evening to Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan region, to evacuate the nurses.

"There will be one official each from the Kerala and central governments on the plane. The nurses will board the flight at Erbil and the plane will reach Kochi at 7am tomorrow (Saturday)."

The nurses, all from Kerala, were on Thursday taken from Tikrit to Mosul by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) militants. They reached Mosul unharmed on Thursday night, their relatives told HT. The nurses worked at a hospital in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown.