“We are coming to liberate Mosul and it will be the fatal and final blow to [ISIL]”, he said.
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Ramadi’s return to government control would continue a string of recent military successes against ISIS, but the group still holds Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, along with Fallujah. Some can be seen slaughtering sheep in celebration near heavily damaged buildings.
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But during the live coverage, explosions and gunfire could be still be heard in the background.
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The Iraqi Prime Minister paid a site visit to the city a day later and planted the Iraqi flag there to highlight the victory.
That strategy includes not only overwhelming Islamic State fighters with coalition air power, but gradually choking off their supply routes and boosting the capability of the Iraqi security forces with specific training and equipment they did not previously have.
US officials appear to be more cautious about the scale of the challenge than their jubilant Iraqi counterparts.
“But the Turkish government has not respected the agreement and we request that the Turkish government announce immediately that it will withdraw from Iraqi territory”, he said.
U.S. Army Colonel Steve Warren, spokesman for the global coalition backing Baghdad, said casualties to Iraqi forces during the battle were in the low double digits.
He said there had been more than 600 airstrikes around Ramadi during the past six months.
The agency reported an unnamed army official as saying that Daesh militants fired rockets at Abadi’s convoy while he was talking to a group of soldiers on the city’s al-Qasim bridge.
MATT BRADLEY: Yes, one of the things that the Iraqi troops were able to do in Ramadi that they were not able to do in previous battles was the combined use of different tactics.
Iraq launched the long-awaited operation to retake the Anbar provincial capital, which was captured by IS militants in May, but after an initial push across the Euphrates River, their progress stalled.
Iraqi forces still have a long way to go to take back their country. They have said most residents were evacuated before the assault.
The Iraqi army had already retaken the city of Tikrit from the jihadists in the spring. Most are backed and financed by Iran-and Mr Abadi has little influence over such groups.
That view was shared by Abi Ali, who saw Baghdadi’s threatening of Jews and Israel as a “great indicator of the trouble Islamic State is in”.
Abadi said on Monday the army would head next to Mosul, the biggest urban centre under Islamic State control. They swept through northern and western Iraq in June 2014 and declared a “caliphate” to rule over all Muslims from territory in both Iraq and Syria, carrying out mass killings and imposing a draconian form of Sunni Islam.
In Syria, the emergence of new leaders is blocked by the multi-sided civil war; secular and moderately Islamist Sunnis are the prime targets of the government of Bashar al-Assad and its Russian and Iranian allies. He said IS fighters still control 30 percent of Ramadi and that government forces do not fully control many districts from which IS fighters have retreated.
Anbar, including Ramadi, was a focus of that campaign at the height of the 2003-2011 US war in Iraq.
“They use them to rapidly built up berms on the sides of an advancing unit”, Warren said of the bulldozers.
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“We have been without food for two months, no water for the past 10 days”, she said.
