Iraqi forces retake centre of IS bastion Hawija
IRAQI forces said yesterday they had retaken the centre of the Islamic State group stronghold of Hawija, one of the jihadists’ last enclaves in the country.
Troops, police and paramilitaries “liberated the whole of the centre of Hawija and are continuing their advance”, the operation’s commander, Lieutenant-General Abdel Amir Yarallah, said.
Government and allied forces launched an offensive last month to oust IS from Hawija, a longtime insurgent bastion.
The town is among the final holdouts from the territory seized by the jihadists in 2014 and its recapture would leave only a handful of remote outposts in IS hands.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi met French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris yesterday for talks on the campaign against IS, which is backed by a US-led coalition including France.
The UN said this week that an estimated 12 500 people had fled Hawija since the launch of the offensive to retake the town and surrounds 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 had 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. “In addition to the terror they have experienced during years under the control of the IS group, many of the families who are arriving are malnourished,” it said.
Coalition spokesman Ryan Dillon hailed the latest advance on Twitter, saying Iraqi forces were continuing “to crush IS in Hawija pocket”.
He said Abadi’s pledge to “liberate all Iraqi territory and to cleanse it from terrorists” was “close” to being realised.
Hawija, 230km north of Baghdad, is one of just two significant areas of Iraq still held by IS, along with a stretch of the Euphrates Valley near the Syrian border, which is also under attack. It has 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 town’s mainly Sunni Arab population is deeply hostile both to the Shiite-led government in Baghdad and to the Kurds who form the historic majority in adjacent areas.
Hawija lies between the two main routes north from Baghdad – to second city Mosul, recaptured from IS in July, and to the city of Kirkuk and the autonomous Kurdish region. — AFP