Internally displaced civilians from Fallujah, who fled their homes during fighting between Iraqi security forces and Islamic State group, arrive to a camp outside Fallujah, Iraq, Monday, June 20, 2016.
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US allies would prefer to concentrate on Islamic State-held Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city that is located in the far north of the country.
The operation’s commander Lt. -Gen.
United States allies would prefer to concentrate on IS-held Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city located in the far north of the country, but in the eyes of the Iraqi government, “whoever controls Fallujah controls the pulse of Iraq’s Sunnis”, and that is a prize worth pursuing, as The Christian Science Monitor’s Taylor Luck reported earlier this month.
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi vowed that Mosul would be liberated “very soon”.
NRC Country Director in Iraq Nasr Muflahi said: “What we’re seeing is the outcome of a delayed and heavily underfunded response with an extreme toll on the civilians fleeing from one nightmare and living through another one”.
The Norwegian agency says it believes 30,000 have left the besieged city in the province of Al-Anbar just in the last few days. He didn’t say how many IS militants remain in Fallujah.
He pointed out that a newly-opened camp in Amriyat al-Fallujah, which houses 1,800 people, has only one toilet for women.
A military statement said the elite counter-terrorism forces took the northeastern Shurta police district while units from Baghdad operations command recaptured the Askari military neighbourhood.
The Daesh elements were pushed back into a handful of northern and western neighborhoods of Fallujah, located in the Western province of Anbar. Since taking over Mosul in summer of 2014, the group has been under attacks by the Kurdish Peshmerga forces and Iraqi army troops, supported by the US-led coalition.
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In the central province of Salahuddin, where IS suffered a major defeat previous year when it lost former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, government forces pushed north of the province toward IS territory, said Brig.
