Iraqi forces dodged sniper fire, car bombs, roadside bombs and booby traps on Friday as they battled to root out militant fighters hunkered down in a strategic compound in central Ramadi.
Elite forces from the counter-terrorism service (CTS) faced limited resistance when they punched into central Ramadi four days earlier, in a final push to retake the city they lost to the Islamic State (IS) group in May.
Militant fighters concentrated their defense around the main government complex in the Hoz neighborhood and now Iraqi forces are struggling to break in.
Photo: Reuters
“We are facing many obstacles, mostly snipers and car bombs,” CTS First Lieutenant Bashar Hussein said from a position in Dhubbat neighborhood, just south of Hoz.
The terrain allows a small number of determined fighters to hold off a larger force.
Iraqi soldiers on Thursday were about 500m from the compound and had only inched a little closer by Friday.
“DAESH [IS] resistance got stiffer as Iraqi forces moved closer to the government compound,” said an army brigadier general, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity.
“Our forces are now just over 300m away from those buildings,” he said.
The number of IS fighters still holding out in the city was estimated at less than 400, with reports of some retreating from the front by using civilians as human shields.
“Operations to liberate Ramadi need time. It isn’t easy to retake it quickly,” Khaldiya District security committee chief Ibrahim al-Fahdawi said.
“Booby-trapped houses, suicide attacks, improvised explosive devices, snipers, mortars, rockets: DAESH is using everything it’s got to stop the progress of the security forces,” al-Fahdawi said.
The IS posted several statements online over the past two days claiming to have inflicted serious losses in multiple attacks across Ramadi.
Iraqi security officials only admitted to limited casualties and said they were able to repulse suicide car bomb attacks.
According to two military sources, at least three government fighters were killed and 13 wounded on Friday during the fighting in Hoz.
The loss of Ramadi, which lies about 100km west of Baghdad, was Baghdad’s most stinging defeat in the war against the IS since the militants took over a third of the nation last year.
A key component of the IS’ victory in May was the use of dozens of massive suicide car bombs to blitz government positions, but more than six months on, the security forces came prepared.
“They’ve tried but they’ve had less success for several reasons,” said Colonel Steve Warren, spokesman for the US-led coalition that has been carrying out daily airstrikes.
“Both Iraqis and the coalition have become much better at identifying these threats earlier on,” he said.
“The Iraqis have been equipped with AT4 shoulder-fired anti-armor rockets, so the coalition has trained them on how to deploy these weapons, provided them with 5,000 of them and the Iraqis have used them to great effect,” Warren said.
Also slowing the security forces’ advance was the presence of civilians trapped in their homes.
Dozens of families that had stayed in central Ramadi, many of them prevented from leaving by the IS on Tuesday when the security forces launched their big push, have managed to flee.
However, al-Fahdawi said dozens remained trapped, mostly in the neighborhoods of al-Thaylah and al-Jamaiyah.
“DAESH detained all the men and left the women and children in their homes... It may be because they want to prevent a revolt against them from what’s left of the male population,” he said.
The operation to retake Ramadi started months earlier with Iraqi forces cutting the IS’ supply lines to parts of Anbar before gradually closing in on the city, taking key bridges, roads and positions one after the other.
Retaking the city would provide a welcome morale boost to the much-criticized military.
It would also isolate the IS bastion of Fallujah, further down the Euphrates valley on the way to Baghdad and continue to shrink the “caliphate” the IS proclaimed last year.
Besides Fallujah, the IS still controls Iraq’s second city of Mosul, around which preparations for an offensive to retake are still at a very early stage.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said in a Christmas message that “retaking our beloved Mosul will be achieved with the cooperation and unity of all Iraqis after victory in the city of Ramadi.”
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