The Iraqi army yesterday stormed the southern edge of Fallujah under US air support, launching a direct assault to retake the city from Islamic State (IS) militants and help protect the nearby capital, Baghdad, from suicide bombings.
As government forces pressed their onslaught, a car bomb as well as suicide bombers driving a car and a motorcycle killed more than 20 people and injured more than 50 in three districts of Baghdad, police and medical sources said.
Bolstered by Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim militia, the Iraqi army launched its operation to recover Fallujah on Monday last week, first by tightening a six-month-old siege around the city 50km west of Baghdad.
Photo: AFP
Fallujah in January 2014 became the first Iraqi city to fall to the Islamic State group, and it subsequently overran wide areas of the north and west of Iraq, declaring a caliphate that included seized territory in Syria.
Army units yesterday advanced to the southern entrance to Fallujah, “steadily advancing” under air cover from the US-led coalition, according to a military statement read out on state TV.
A Reuters TV crew on the scene said explosions and gunfire were ripping through Fallujah’s southern Naimiya district.
A Shiite militia coalition known as Popular Mobilization, or Hashid Shaabi, were seeking to consolidate the siege by dislodging militants from Saqlawiya, a village just to the north of Fallujah.
The militias have pledged not to take part in the assault on the mainly Sunni Muslim city itself to avoid aggravating sectarian strife.
Fallujah is a bastion of the Sunni insurgency that fought the US occupation of Iraq and the Shiite-led Baghdad government that took over after the fall of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, in 2003.
The offensive is causing alarm among international aid organization over the humanitarian situation in the city, where more than 50,000 civilians remain trapped with limited access to water, food and health care.
Fallujah is the second-largest Iraqi city still under control of the militants, after Mosul.
Kurdish Peshmerga forces on Sunday launched an attack to oust militants from a handful of villages about 20km east of Mosul so as to increase the pressure on Islamic State and pave the way for storming the city.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi hopes to recapture Mosul later this year to deal a decisive defeat to the Islamic State group.
Yesterday’s bombings targeted two densely populated Shiite districts, Shaab and Sadr City, and one predominantly Sunni suburb, Tarmiya, north of Baghdad.
A car bomb in Shaab killed 12 people and injured more than 20, while in Tarmiya seven were killed and about 20 injured by a suicide bomber who pulled up in a car outside a government building guarded by police.
In Sadr City, a suicide bomber on a motorcycle killed two people and injured seven.
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