Army retakes the last Iraq stronghold of Isil’s ‘caliphate’

THE Iraqi army retook the last town in the country still held by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) yesterday as the jihadists’ self-proclaimed “caliphate” faced collapse on both sides of the border with Syria.

The recapture of the small Euphrates valley town of Rawa, in an offensive launched at dawn, came as the jihadists were also under attack for a second day just over the border in Albu Kamal, the last town they still hold in Syria,

Isil has lost 95 per cent of the crossborder “caliphate” it declared in Iraq and Syria in 2014, the Us-led coalition claimed.

Government troops and paramilitary units “liberated the whole of Rawa and raised the Iraqi flag on all of its official buildings,” General Abdelamir Yarallah of Iraq’s Joint Operations Command said in a statement.

The stretch of Euphrates valley abutting the border with Syria has long been a bastion of Sunni Arab insurgency, first against Us-led troops after the invasion of 2003 and then against the Shiite-led government in Baghdad.

Us-led troops carried out repeated operations in 2005 to flush out alqaeda jihadists. The region swiftly fell to Isil when its fighters swept through the Sunni Arab heartland north and west of Baghdad in 2014 before proclaiming its “caliphate”.

The jihadists once controlled a territory the size of Britain but they have successively lost all their key strongholds, including Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.