Iraq declares victory over IS in Tal Afar

ISTANBUL — Another city in Iraq has slipped the grasp of the Islamic State, the extremist group that three years ago controlled a vast caliphate straddling Iraq and Syria that threatened to rewrite Middle Eastern borders drawn after World War I.

Now the group is on its back foot with its latest loss, the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar, which Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq declared liberated on Thursday.

The relatively quick victory in Tal Afar, after an 11-day battle by Iraqi forces backed by U.S. air power, comes on the heels of the grueling and bloody ninemonth fight for Mosul, the largest Iraqi city the Islamic State ever controlled.

The mounting losses sustained by the group suggest that its days of administering territory are waning. Iraqi forces continue to push west, toward the Syrian border, while in Syria, U.S.backed Kurdish and Arab fighters press their assault on Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital.

Still, the fight is likely to go on for months. The Islamic State still controls large parts of Syria and Iraq and has proved resilient despite previous reports of its decline. The Iraqi military’s next target, the city of Hawija, is likely to be more complicated.

Even as Iraq’s national television station broadcast the announcement of the liberation of Tal Afar, the plume of smoke from an airstrike could be seen in the area. And in Ayadiya, a nearby village where some Islamic State fighters put up a last stand, fighting continued into the night Thursday.

Tal Afar, while smaller than other cities the terrorist group had seized, had taken on outsize importance. The hometown of many Islamic State leaders, it has long been a stronghold of extremist views, and it was among the first Iraqi cities to fall to the rebels when they began their sweep across northern Iraq in 2014.