Iraq’s Prime Minister has vowed to rid the country of Islamic State in the next year, after counter-terrorism forces reclaimed the western city of Ramadi from IS fighters.
Advertisement
Yesterday, Iraqi forces, backed by US-led airstrikes, drove IS militants out of the city center and raised the Iraqi flag over the government complex there.
Over the weekend, al-Abadi had vowed that 2016 would be the year of “final victory” against Daesh in Iraq, saying the next battle against the militant group would be in Mosul, Daesh’s stronghold.
The retaking of Ramadi by Iraq’s army marked the first major success of the U.S.-trained force that initially fled in the face of Islamic State’s advance 18 months ago.
Soldiers were shown on state television on Monday publicly slaughtering a sheep in an act of celebration.
The former government headquarters in Ramadi was the epicentre of the fighting but Iraqi forces did not rush in when ISIS pulled out because the entire area was rigged.
A turning point in the fight to regain the city came yesterday morning, when Isil gun positions within the government compound finally fell silent, although Iraqi army commanders said last night that they were still dealing with pockets of resistance. The government says most civilians were able to evacuate before it launched its assault.
“We will continue to support the Government of Iraq as it re-establishes the security, governance and services the people of Ramadi will need as they return to their city”, Hammond noted. Still, the victory is the clearest sign yet that the Islamic State, after laying claim to huge parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014, is losing momentum and in retreat.
Iraq’s army took the lead in the battle for Ramadi, with the Shi’ite militias prominent in other campaigns held back from the battlefield to avoid antagonizing the mainly Sunni population.
Abadi later announced the visit himself on Twitter. Instead, American advisers helped train thousands of local Sunni tribal fighters, who oppose the Islamic State, to secure neighborhoods captured from the militants.
With the increasingly desperate terrorist group haemorraghing territory in both Iraq and northern Syria, its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi released a freakish audio recording over Christmas welcoming the defeats as a “blessing from Allah” and calling for more recruits.
Advertisement
Ramadi and Fallujah, Sunni Arab cities where distrust of the Shiite-led government runs deep, were major bastions of the insurgency in the years after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
