Baghdad: The IS group now controls less than seven per cent of Iraq, down from the 40 per cent it held nearly three years ago, a military spokesman said on Tuesday.
Iraqi forces backed by US-led air strikes and other support are now battling IS inside second city Mosul, after retaking much of the other territory the extremists had seized. “Daesh controlled 40 per cent of Iraqi land” in 2014, Brigadier General Yahya Rasool told reporters, using an Arabic acronym for IS.
“As of March 31 (this year), they only held 6.8 per cent of Iraqi territory,” said Rasool, the spokesman of the Joint Operations Command coordinating the anti-IS effort.
Various members of the forces, Iraqi and foreign, battling the IS have disagreed in the past on figures about control of territory, but IS has been losing ground steadily for close to two years. Iraqi forces with the backing of the US-led coalition — which has thousands of military personnel deployed in Iraq and carries out daily air strikes — launched a major offensive to retake Mosul in October 2016.
They retook control of the eastern side of the city, which is divided by the Tigris River, in January and have since mid-February been battling die-hard extremists holed up in their last west Mosul redoubts.
The full recapture of Mosul, the de facto capital of the “caliphate” that IS proclaimed nearly three years ago, would end the extremists’ dreams of a cross-border state.
Speaking at the same press conference in Baghdad on Tuesday, the spokesman for the US-led coalition vowed that Iraq would not be abandoned after the recapture of Mosul. — AFP
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