Troops open push to take Islamic State stronghold
IRBIL, Iraq — In a push at dawn, Iraqi forces opened an operation Thursday to retake the town of Hawija — one of the last extremist strongholds in Iraq — from the Islamic State group, according to a statement from the Iraqi prime minister’s office.
The operation began just two days after Iraqi forces began an offensive against Islamic State holdouts in Iraq’s vast western Anbar province, said Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.
Hawija, 150 miles north of Baghdad, is one of the last pockets of territory held by the extremist group in the country. Islamic State militants have been steadily losing ground and seeing its sprawling caliphate that in 2014 spanned a third of the territory of Iraq and also neighboring Syria crumbling fast.
Earlier this month, Iraqi and U.S.-led coalition planes stepped up a campaign of air strikes on Hawija, targeting Islamic State bases and weapons centers.
Islamic State “now faces the mighty (Iraqi security forces in) the last two areas where they hold any territory in Iraq,” U.S.-led coalition spokesman Col. Ryan Dillon said Thursday morning in a statement posted on Twitter.
In the western Anbar province, Iraqi forces retook the town of Rihana on Wednesday, according to a statement from the coalition. The territory the Islamic State group holds in the western province lies mainly along the border with Syria in the Euphrates River valley.
Iraqi forces declared victory over the extremists in Mosul in July and in the western town of Tal Afar the next month.
Plans to retake Hawija have been complicated by political wrangling among the Iraqi security forces, Shiite armed groups and the Kurdish
peshmerga troops. The town is part of the Kirkuk governorate, which is disputed between the central government in Baghdad and the northern Iraqi Kurdish autonomous region, where a referendum on independence is scheduled to take place next week.
Tensions have risen in the area recently as Kurdish leaders are pressing ahead with the referendum, a move dismissed by the central government as illegal and destabilizing to the country.
Iraq armed forces spokesman Gen. Yahyah Rasul said that Kurdish
peshmerga forces will remain involved in the battle to clear Islamic State militants from the area, despite recent tensions over Kirkuk.
Rasul said that between 800 and 1,500 Islamic State extremists remained holed up inside Hawija.
Dillon, the coalition spokesman, said the Kurdish referendum had pulled “resources and focus” away from the fight against the Islamic State group. He also predicted that after swift Iraqi victories in western Anbar, the battle for Hawija will be “hard fighting.”
The coalition air strikes, in coordination with Iraq forces, have hit 29 Islamic State targets already in Hawija and 34 in western Anbar, Dillon said.
“We will annihilate Daesh and prevent their return,” he added, referring to Islamic State by its Arabic acronym.