Iraqi troops yesterday launched an assault on the last Islamic State (IS) group bastion in the country, even as Kurdish authorities said that Baghdad’s forces had attacked Kurdish fighters near the border with Turkey.
There have been fears that the bitter dispute that has raged between the Baghdad government and Iraqi Kurdish leaders since they held a referendum for independence last month would hamper the campaign against the militants.
However, federal troops and allied paramilitaries pressed ahead with a threatened drive up the Euphrates valley toward the Syrian border in a bid to retake two Sunni Arab towns that have been bastions of insurgency since soon after the US-led invasion of 2003.
Iraqi forces have retaken more than 90 percent of the territory IS seized in the country in 2014, with the militants now confined to a small stretch of the valley adjoining some of the last areas they still hold in Syria.
“The heroic legions are advancing into the last den of terrorism in Iraq to liberate al-Qaim, Rawa and the surrounding villages and hamlets,” Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said in a statement from Iran, where he is on a state visit.
“They will all return to the arms of the motherland thanks to the determination and endurance of our fighting heroes,” he said. “The people of IS have no choice but to die or surrender.”
Al-Qaim has been renowned as a bastion of Sunni Arab insurgency for years. Coalition troops carried out repeated operations with names like Matador and Steel Curtain in 2005 to flush out al-Qaeda militants.
The town lies at the heart of a wealthy agricultural region and was once a railhead for the phosphate mining center of Akhashat in the desert to the south.
In the era of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, al-Qaim’s huge chemical factory treated uranium to feed Iraq’s nuclear program, but US airstrikes in 1991 and then UN inspections transformed the factory into a metallic skeleton.
Coalition commanders are convinced that al-Qaim will be IS’s last stand in its ambitions to maintain territorial control of the cross-border caliphate it proclaimed in 2014.
On the Syrian side of the border, Russian-backed Syrian government forces have been pushing down the Euphrates valley, while US-backed Kurdish and Arab fighters have been attacking IS from their stronghold in the north.
The launch of the offensive against IS’ last Iraqi redoubt comes with thousands of Iraqi federal troops and militia engaged in an operation to reassert federal control over thousands of square kilometers of territory long disputed with the Kurds.
Yesterday, federal troops and allied paramilitaries stepped up that operation, assaulting Kurdish forces in a disputed oil-rich area in Nineveh province, in the far north near the Turkish border, Kurdish authorities said.
“As of 6am, Iraqi forces and Iranian-backed PMF [Hashed al-Shaabi — Popular Mobilisation Forces] are shelling Peshmerga positions from Zummar front, northwest Mosul, using heavy artillery,” the top defense body of the autonomous Kurdish regional government said. “They are advancing towards Peshmerga positions.”
Parts of Nineveh province north and east of Mosul, Iraq’s second city, are some of the last areas that Kurdish forces still hold outside their long-standing three-province autonomous region.
The Zummar district lies close to the course of a strategic oil export pipeline linking the Kirkuk fields with the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan that fell into disuse during IS’ lightning sweep through northern and western Iraq in 2014. Al-Abadi on Wednesday visited Ankara and discussed its reopening with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“We are ready to provide any kind of support to allow the operation of the pipeline,” Erdogan told a joint news conference after their talks.
To the anger of Baghdad, Ankara had allowed the Kurdish government to open an alternative export pipeline through its territory to export oil from Kirkuk and other areas it then held.
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