Despite the focus on control of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, U.S. military officials have said they want the Iraqi forces to continue plans to recapture Mosul, where the majority of ISIS fighters in Iraq are located.
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Fighting was still under way in parts of the city, where USA and Iraqi warplanes targeted snipers and other Islamic State positions, said Brig. Gen.
A spokesman for the USA -led coalition said Apache attack helicopters had conducted operations in support of Iraqi forces in the Tigris river valley, where the advance is situated.
Tens of thousands of civilians have been forced from their homes since the start of the operation last month.
Elite federal forces met limited resistance from Isis fighters, who are redeploying on the western outskirts of the city, military commanders said. The city is now a test of the militant group’s staying power in Iraq, and vital for the government as it tries to reassert control of the country and launch an offensive on Mosul 400 kilometers to the north. Mosul is Iraq’s largest northern city and ISIS’s de facto capital in the country.
Lieutenant General Abdulwahab al-Saadi, the commander of the operation, said that special forces were continuing their push to force the last remaining IS fighters out of the city.
The International Organization for Migration said on Saturday more than 81,000 people had been displaced by the fighting in Falluja, which had a population about three times that size before the Islamic State seizure in early 2014.
“The counter-terrorism service and the rapid response forces have retaken the government compound in the centre of Falluja”, the operation’s overall commander, Lt Gen Abdul-Wahab al-Saadi, said.
Al-Abadi on Friday vowed that Mosul will be the next target of the Iraqi forces.
The first to escape I.S. rule were in rural outlying areas, in the early phase of the operation, which saw a myriad different Iraqi forces seal the siege of the city.
Security officials said many Isis members had managed to slip out of the city by blending in with fleeing civilians in recent days, in some cases paying off security forces.
Humanitarian groups including Human Rights Watch have raised concerns about a sectarian killing spree if the predominantly Sunni city is freed, since some Iraqi Shiites see all Sunnis as Islamic State collaborators. Iraq is also hosting up to 300,000 refugees who have fled the civil war in neighboring Syria.
CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer says taking the compound is a major symbolic victory for the Iraqi army – and the latest in a series of high profile defeats for ISIS.
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For weeks, families, many with small children, had been fleeing under sniper fire and punishing heat to arrive at camps set up outside the city. Aid groups such as Doctors Without Borders and the Norwegian Refugee Council say the number of those who have fled Fallujah is lower, closer to 30,000.
