Iraqi forces yesterday hunted down holdout extremists in Fallujah after retaking the city center and trained their sights on Mosul, the Islamic State’s last remaining major hub in the country.
While not fully under government control yet, Fallujah is the latest in a string of battlefields losses for the Islamic State, which has seen its two-year-old “caliphate” shrink significantly in recent months.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi on Friday declared Fallujah retaken after the national flag was raised over the main government compound, but militants still hold most northern neighborhoods.
Photo: AFP
Elite Iraqi forces “are continuing their progress in the liberation of neighborhoods in northern Fallujah,” Iraqi Army Lieutenant General Abdulwahab al-Saadi, the overall commander of the operation, told reporters.
Meanwhile, forces led by al-Anbar Governorate police, where Fallujah is located, were combing reconquered southern neighborhoods for pockets of Islamic State fighters and mines, he said.
In December last year, al-Abadi announced the recapture of the city of Ramadi, the capital of al-Anbar, but security forces only established full control over the city in February.
Al-Saadi and other commanders said Iraqi forces faced only limited resistance during the major advance that saw them push into the heart of Fallujah and clinch a breakthrough in the four-week-old operation.
Security sources said Islamic State fighters have been slipping out of the city by blending in with civilians fleeing the fighting.
The extremist group’s retreat from Fallujah sparked what the Norwegian Refugee Council described as “an unprecedented tidal wave of mass displacement from Fallujah.”
It said late on Friday that up to 20,000 people fled the city in just a few hours.
Footage on social media showed hundreds of people swimming across the Euphrates River to reach safety.
“It is unknown how many families are still trapped inside Fallujah, but we are concerned they are the most vulnerable — pregnant women, elderly people, people with disabilities,” the council said.
Aid groups have been warning for days they would be overwhelmed by the flow of displaced and were running low on funding and supplies to respond to the humanitarian crisis.
Building on the momentum of the Fallujah operation, Iraq yesterday announced that joint Kurdish-government forces were starting a new phase in the push on Mosul from the south.
“We started at 5am the second phase of the liberation of Nineveh,” Iraqi Minister of Defense Khaled al-Obeidi told reporters.
“The target of the operation is to take Qayyarah and make it a launchpad for Mosul,” al-Obeidi said.
Qayyarah, which has an airfield, lies across the Tigris River from the main base of pro-government forces in the Kurdish-controlled area of Makhmur, about 60km south of Mosul.
Al-Abadi ignored US advice to focus on Mosul last month when he declared the launch of the Fallujah operation, but on Friday he vowed that the liberation of the northern city was “very near.”
The embattled prime minister has promised that the Islamic State would be defeated nationwide by the end of this year, but an ongoing offensive in the Nineveh Governorate, of which Mosul is the capital, has achieved only modest gains so far.
Fallujah, where US forces suffered some of their worst losses since the Vietnam War, looms large in modern extremist mythology, but Mosul is much larger.
Patrick Martin, an Iraq analyst with the Institute for the Study of War, said that the Islamic State could survive the loss of Fallujah.
“The ISIS [Islamic State] messaging machine will likely find ways to continue attracting recruits and encouraging lone-wolf attacks, despite the loss of Fallujah,” he said.
The extremist group, which has recorded few military successes on home turf lately and grabbed more headlines for claiming attacks in the West, faces major offensives on its de facto capital in Syria, al-Raqqah, and on Mosul.
“Mosul and al-Raqqah could be very different battles, since when they fall, the delusions of holding a caliphate completely fall away,” said Patrick Skinner, an analyst with the Soufan Group.
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