Iraqi troops have begun a long-awaited operation to seize control of the embattled city of Falluja from Islamic State, amid fears the militants will use the tens of thousands of civilians trapped in the city as human shields.
The assault, launched in the early hours of Monday, comes after a week of preparations that focused on encircling the city, which fell to Isis early in 2014, months before it announced the creation of its self-proclaimed caliphate.
Backed by US-led coalition airstrikes, Iraqi commanders said elite counter-terrorism forces had begun a multi-pronged attack aiming to reach the city centre.
“Iraqi forces entered Falluja under air cover from the international coalition, the Iraqi air force and army aviation, and supported by artillery and tanks,” said Lt Gen Abdelwahab al-Saadi, the commander of the operation.
Explosions and gunfire could be heard in the southern Naimiya district as Iraqi forces advanced and state television reported that an elite military unit seized the district’s police station at midday local time.
The assault is likely to last for days amid stiff resistance from the militants, who have long been entrenched in Falluja, which was seized months before Isis surged into northern Iraq and conquered the Nineveh plains and the city of Mosul.
It also comes amid a concerted campaign against Isis in both Iraq and Syria that has stretched the militants across multiple fronts and brought anti-Isis forces closer to the Syrian city of Raqqa, its de facto capital, and Mosul, Iraq’s second city.
Kurdish paramilitaries and Arab fighters backed by US special forces are expanding their offensive in northern Syria, drawing closer to Raqqa, while the Turkish military said it had killed at least 28 Isis fighters in shelling north of Aleppo on Sunday.
In Iraq, Kurdish troops on Sunday launched a campaign to liberate a series of villages on the road east from Mosul to Erbil.
But the Falluja offensive faces many hurdles, including an estimated 50,000 civilians who remain trapped and besieged, facing starvation inside the confines of the city, and that observers fear will be used as human shields to slow the progress of Iraqi forces.
The UN high commissioner for refugees said 800 civilians had so far fled Falluja over the past few days, often traveling on foot and escaping through irrigation pipes. Those inside the city have had little access to food and clean water, since roads into the jihadist stronghold were cut off in December last year.
Some also fear retribution by auxiliary Shia militias taking part in the campaign, a number of whom are suspicious that the civilians who have remained in the city are sympathetic to the Isis cause.
In a video published over the weekend, the leader of the Abul Fadl al-Abbas militia called for the cleansing of the “tumor of Falluja”, saying there were no patriots in the city.
Isis responded to the offensive by dispatching suicide bombers in and around Baghdad, in three attacks that targeted the populous Sadr City suburb and the Shaab neighborhood, as well as the Tarmiya area north of the capital, killing more than 20 people in the largely Shia districts.
Isis claimed responsibility for the attacks in statements circulated online, which also featured images of the suicide bomber who carried out the Tarmiya attack, a foreign fighter of Moroccan origin.
Isis militants also claimed to have killed dozens of Iraqi forces in the fighting around Falluja, and to have dispatched two suicide bombers against their advance.
Just 40 miles, or less than an hour’s drive, west of Baghdad, Falluja was the first main Iraqi town to come under Isis’s control and links it to earlier groups fighting the US and the central government.
“Symbolically, since the days of the US occupation, the city has acquired a status of resistance to outside forces,” said Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a fellow at the Middle East Forum. “Significant damage is likely, as Isis is really putting up a fight to retain the city.”
If the advance on Falluja succeeds, it will effectively pen Isis back towards Mosul, with limited chances of it breaking out to seize more Iraqi territory.
But Mosul could stay beyond government reach for a long time. It is more important to Isis than Ramadi or Falluja, strategically and financially, and fighters are dug in far more deeply among a larger civilian population.
If the cost in civilian lives of pushing Isis out of Falluja is high, it could set a bloody template for the defence of Mosul, and make a drive to reclaim the city even more complicated.
guardian
0 Comments