Iraq retakes IS bastion Hawija

Hawija: Iraqi forces retook one of the IS group’s last two enclaves in the country on Thursday, overrunning the longtime insurgent bastion of Hawija after a two-week offensive. Only a stretch of the Euphrates Valley near the border with Syria remains to be retaken from the terrorists who have suffered defeat after defeat in Iraq this year.

“I announce the liberation of the city of Hawija,” Prime Minister Haider al Abadi told a news conference in Paris. ‘‘All that remains is the strip on the border with Syria.”

The operation’s commander, Lieutenant General Abdel Amir Yarallah, had earlier announced that troops, police and paramilitaries had retaken the city centre.

Hawija, 230 km north of Baghdad, was among the final holdouts from the territory seized by the terrorists in 2014. The town had been an insurgent bastion since soon after the US-led invasion of 2003, earning it the nickname of “Kandahar in Iraq” for the ferocious resistance it put up similar to that in the Taliban militia’s citadel in Afghanistan.

The area’s population is deeply hostile both to the government in Baghdad and to the Kurds who form the historic majority in adjacent areas.

Government forces bypassed it in their advance north to second city Mosul last year, which culminated in the IS defeat in the emblematic bastion in July.

Hawija lies between the two main routes north from Baghdad — to Mosul and to the city of Kirkuk and the autonomous Kurdish region — and it recapture is both a symbolic and a strategic victory for the government.

The United Nations said this week that an estimated 12,500 people had fled since the launch of the offensive to retake the town and surrounding areas last month. The UN’s humanitarian affairs office said the number of people still in the town was unknown but could be as high as 78,000. It said humanitarian agencies have set up checkpoints, camps and emergency sites capable of receiving more than 70,000 people who could flee. The Norwegian Refugee Council said many of those arriving in the camps had little more than the clothes on their backs. Coalition spokesman Ryan Dillon hailed the latest advance on Twitter, saying Iraqi forces were continuing “to crush ISIS in Hawija pocket” and that Abadi’s pledge to “liberate all Iraqi territory and to cleanse it from terrorists” was “close” to being fulfilled.

IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has been forced out of most of the territory it seized in Iraq and Syria during a lightning offensive in the summer of 2014 that was followed by its declaration of a cross-border “caliphate”. At one point it controlled nearly a third of Iraqi territory.

Last week, it was ousted from Anna, one of three towns it still held in the Euphrates Valley, and Iraqi forces are preparing to advance upstream towards the other two, Rawa and Al-Qaim. — AFP