Smoke rises after an airstrike by US -led coalition warplanes as Iraqi security forces advance towards Shuhada neighborhood of Fallujah to retake the city from Islamic State militants, Iraq, Friday, June 3, 2016.
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“We liberated it”, they say, holding the Islamic State flag upside down.
Government forces, backed by militias and air support from the US-led coalition has launched an offensive to retake the city, that was the first to fall to the IS extremist group in January 2014. Abu Tabarak’s family had spent four days picking their way across the city, moving slowly to avoid shelling, sniper fire and explosive devices.
Iraqi security forces and allied Popular Mobilization Forces stand during their fight against ISIS militants in Saqlawiyah near Fallujah on Thursday.
The Iraqi military recaptured the central city of Ramadi, Anbar’s provincial capital, last December.
Six months later, the radical Sunni group stormed through Sunni areas of northern Iraq, taking the country’s second-largest city, Mosul. On the city’s northeastern edge, Shiite militia forces fired mortar rounds into the city from suburbs cleared by Iraqi federal police.
Inside Fallujah, residents are facing worsening shortages in food, water, and medicine, as well as extreme violence, fueled in part by forced recruitment into the fight by ISIS, among other problems.
But current and former US military officials and local Sunni leaders say the militias continue to take advantage of the vacuums that emerge in predominantly Sunni areas after ISIS forces are defeated. Militias have repeatedly taken advantage of the power vacuums that have emerged after Islamic State defeats.
Shia militias have been repeatedly accused by Human Rights Watch of committing abuses in areas north of Baghdad.
Iraq’s government has ordered the militias to stay away from the fighting inside the city.
While there was swift progress securing Fallujah’s outskirts, pushing into the city has been much slower.
“We are expecting many more”, once inside the city’s more urban neighborhoods, al-Saadi said.
These government-aligned militiamen have helped push the Islamic State out of key areas of the country but also have become a complication for the US -backed military coalition assembled to destroy the hard-line Sunni group.
The lightning advance from the southwest brought government troops to within less than 40 kilometres (25 miles) of Tabqa, which is also the site of an airbase, Abdel Rahman said.
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Two children, their mother and a man drowned crossing the 300-metre (1,000-feet) wide Euphrates, one the few escape routes left for civilians hoping to leave the besieged town as the war against the militants intensifies. The battle will likely go street by street and house by house.
