Air strikes have killed an Islamic State leader in Fallujah, it has been confirmed, in a blow to the terrorist organisation’s hopes of maintaining their grasp on the Iraqi city.
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“Phase one is over and we have achieved our objectives”, Brigadier Rasool Yahya told Al Jazeera.
The five fighters were arrested inside the city of Fallujah, and the Sharia Court made a decision to execute them publicly on charges of “high treason”.
“We are advancing on and closing in”.
“After they caught him, they killed him and dumped his body in the street” to deter others from trying to flee, he said. “The enemy left the outskirts and stationed itself inside Fallujah”.
U.S. Army Colonel Steve Warren, a spokesman for the U.S. -led military campaign against Islamic State, said the coalition had carried out 20 strikes in support of the campaign over the past four days. “People trapped in the city centre are thought to be most at risk – unable to flee”, the United Nations said.
“The situation inside Fallujah is getting critical by the day”, Nasr Muflahi, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Iraq director, said.
Iraqi troops pushed toward Fallujah from the south Friday, aiming to completely surround the militant-held city, Iraq’s elite counterterrrorism forces said.
“We are facing very severe resistance, many booby traps and IEDs (improvised explosive devices) that we need to deal with before we move forward”, the statement said. The government has put available exit routes for those civilians trapped in the city, but just a few have been able to escape through them. Locals, though, say conditions there have deteriorated under the group’s control.
“We retook this area two days ago, then we pushed ahead and arrived in Karma”, an Iraqi Army commander said, EURONews reported.
The Islamic State’s commander in Fallujah was among 70 militants killed in an airstrike, the US military announced. And it creates confusion and it causes the second-in-command to have to move up.
Officials from the city said that many of those people in danger have been killed by shelling from forces outside the city, but the government forces denied those claims, as reported by the Washington Post.
Fallujah’s population is around 100,000, according to USA and Iraqi government estimates.
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Abadi said security forces should be free to concentrate on the offensive that began on Monday to dislodge the ultra-hardline Sunni militants from Falluja, the first Iraqi city that fell under IS control in Iraq, in January 2014. Local sources estimate that its population is down to between 50,000 and 60,000 people compared to 350,000 in 2011 before Iraq slid back into a full scale war.
