Noose tightens round IS in Tikrit

BAGHDAD: Iraqi security forces and militia fighters captured part of Tikrit’s northern Qadisiya district yesterday in their first advance into the city seized nine months ago by the self-styled Islamic State militants, security officials and the provincial governor said.

The home city of executed former president Saddam Hussein, Tikrit is the focus of Baghdad’s biggest counteroffensive to push back the Islamic State’s sweep through northern and central Iraq.

More than 20 000 troops and Iranian-backed Shia Muslim militias known as Hashid Shaabi, supported by local Sunni Muslim tribes, launched the offensive 10 days ago, seizing territory to the east and along the Tigris river to the north and south.

On Tuesday they took the town of al-Alam on the northern edge of Tikrit, paving the way for an attack on the city itself.

“The governor of Salahuddin announces the purging of half of Qadisiya district, the largest of Tikrit’s neighbourhoods,” governor Raed al-Jubouri’s office said.

The army and militia fighters raised the national flag above a military hospital in the section of Qadisiya they had retaken from the militants.

Yesterday morning’s offensive then stalled when advancing troops came under sniper fire and paused to defuse roadside bombs and booby-trapped buildings.

To the west of the city, advancing forces were halted by a minefield on the outskirts. To the south, the army and two military helicopters shelled Islamic State positions but no ground operation was taking place, the sources said.

Security officials said on Tuesday that Islamic State fighters blew up a bridge over the Tigris, which could hinder a co-ordinated assault on the city from different directions.

If Iraq’s Shi’ite-led government is able to retake Tikrit it would be the first city clawed back from the Sunni insur- gents and would give it momentum in the next, pivotal stage of the campaign – to recapture Mosul, the largest city in the north.

Mosul is the biggest city held by the ultra-radical Islamic State, who now rule a self-declared cross-border caliphate in Sunni regions of Syria and Iraq.

In the past few months Islamic State has gradually lost ground in Iraq to the army, Shia militias and Kurdish peshmerga forces, backed by air strikes carried out by a US-led coalition of mainly Western and allied Arab states.

The US says Baghdad did not seek aerial backup from the coalition in the Tikrit campaign. Instead, support on the ground has come from neighbouring Iran, Washington’s long-time regional rival, which has sent an elite Revolutionary Guard commander to oversee part of the battle.

In the western province of Anbar, suicide car bombers in seven vehicles attacked Iraqi army positions in the provincial capital Ramadi, about 90km west of Baghdad, police and medical sources say.

Five people were killed in the attacks, including two policemen, and 19 were wounded, a medical source said, stressing that the toll was only preliminary.

The governor announces the purging of half of Qadisiya district