Over the past year, Iraqi forces backed by US-led airstrikes have, city by city, regained large parts of the country.
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A senior army spokesperson said he expects IS to “suffer a total breakdown during the next hours”. The U.S. -led coalition, which has carried out airstrikes in support of the Fallujah operation, had initially favored focusing efforts on recapturing Mosul.
Saadi said that Iraqi soldiers had faced only limited resistance in the campaign to recapture the city.
He said there were no plans to storm the hospital. Fallujah, located almost 50 kilometers from the capital Baghdad, was one of ISIL’s most emblematic strongholds.
After beginning their initial assault last month, Iraq’s elite special forces encountered a complex network of booby traps on the city’s outskirts. Iraqi special forces entered the center of Fallujah city early Friday, taking over a government complex and a neighbo.
General Talib Shaghati Mshari al-Kenani, who heads the Joint Operations Command waging Iraq’s war against IS, said the military had information that residents inside Mosul, estimated at more than one million, were preparing to rise up against the insurgents and was in contact with them to synchronise such action with an external military assault.
Iraqi forces launched a massive military operation to take back Fallujah on May 23.
Abadi, who was facing huge political pressure over the reform of his own government when he declared the launch of the Fallujah operation, vowed Friday that Mosul was the next target.
IS overran Falluja, a predominantly Sunni Arab area, in January 2014 – six months before it seized control of large parts of northern and western Iraq.
“While the capture of Fallujah would inflict a heavy blow on Islamic State, it is quite early to declare a victory there”, said Nihat Ali Ozcan, a strategist at the Economic Policy Research Foundation in Ankara, Turkey.
A spokesman for the US -led coalition said Apache attack helicopters had conducted operations in support of Iraqi forces in the Tigris river valley, where the advance is situated. Can its forces – which include a significant Shia militia element – prevent the mistreatment of local Sunnis?
“There are reports of a dramatic increase in the number of executions of men and older boys in Falluja (who are) refusing to fight on behalf of extremist forces”, said Leila Jane Nassif, the United Nations agency’s assistant representative in Iraq.
Several civilians have also been killed by militants while attempting to escape the city, including, on Monday, a two-year-old boy who was being carried by his mother.
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The Islamic State has been “broken” in the city, said Col. Abdelrahman al-Khazali, a police spokesman. Tents had run out, and food and water supplies were dangerously low.
