Iraq launches final sweep to flush out IS

Iraqi forces launched a sweep through the western desert to flush out remaining Islamic State group fighters on Thursday, an operation the prime minister has said will spell the jihadists’ “final defeat” in the country.

The arid, sparsely populated wastelands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are the last refuge of the jihadists in Iraq after troops and paramilitaries ousted them from both valleys and all urban areas.

“The Iraqi army, the federal police and the Hashed al-Shaabi [Popular Mobilisation paramilitary units] this morning began clearing the Al-Jazeera region straddling Salaheddin, Nineveh and Anbar Provinces,” the head of Joint Operations Command, General Abdelamir Yarallah, said in a statement.

The Hashed al-Shaabi released live footage from Siniyah in Saleheddin Province of bulldozers clearing an earthen barrier to allow heavy armor to advance into the desert.

The tanks bore both the Iraq national flag and that of the paramilitary force, which is made up largely of Shiite militias – a black standard bearing the name of Imam Hussein, one of the faith’s most revered figures.

Long lines of pick-up trucks waited to follow.

The Hashed said its forces had already taken control of a dozen villages, destroying a car bomb and defusing dozens of booby-traps planted by the jihadists.

The Al-Jazeera region is where IS fighters took refuge when Iraqi forces recaptured the last towns they still held in a successful drive up the Euphrates Valley to the Syrian border earlier this month.