Iraqi government forces backed by US airstrikes and advisers pushed Islamic State militants out of agricultural areas outside of Fallujah on Monday as they launched a military offensive to recapture the city from the extremists.
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“No one can leave. It’s risky. There are snipers everywhere along the exit routes”, one resident told Reuters.
The UN’s refugee agency said yesterday that some 80 families have fled Fallujah over the past few days.
Nearby forces lobbed regular artillery fire at Fallujah, just two to three miles to the west. Capture of the largely Sunni Muslim city, whose seizure by Islamic State militants in early 2014 foreshadowed the group’s later military success across Iraq, would represent an important victory for the embattled Abadi.
It is estimated that around 75,000 people remain in Fallujah, compared to a pre-war population of around 300,000.
Fallujah is one of two main cities in the mainly Sunni al-Anbar province, which stretches west from Baghdad to the Syrian and Jordanian borders. The authorities have pledged to retake Mosul, the north’s biggest city, this year in keeping with a USA plan to oust Islamic State from their de facto capitals in Iraq and Syria.
Iraqi forces, backed by Shia militias and U.S. airstrikes, have launched a operation to retake Falluja from Islamic State, which has used the city as a redoubt within reach of Baghdad for more than two years.
As Iraqi forces retook a town east of Fallujah as they closed in on the city that saw deadly battles in 2004 between insurgents and American forces, Islamic State claimed bombings in neighboring Syria that killed at least 148 people.
Human rights groups have voiced concerns that the Iraqi government forces attacking the majority Sunni town are augmented by Shiite militias backed by Iran.
“Army forces and the Hashd al-Shaabi shelled Fallujah from morning till evening on Monday with more than 30 mortar rounds”, al-Jerisi said.
Resourceful residents have begun appropriating solar panels affixed to street lights to generate power in their homes.
Fallujah was the first of several cities in Iraq to fall to ISIS in 2014. The authorities have pledged to retake Mosul this year in keeping with a US plan to dislodge ISIS from their de facto capitals in Iraq and Syria.
“The series of bombings that have happened in Baghdad over the last couple of weeks have made it important for Baghdad to take down Fallujah”, Douglas Ollivant, an analyst with the New America Foundation who worked on Iraq under USA presidents Obama and Bush, said.
Fallujah will be the most hard fight yet for the Iraqi military, which is still struggling to regroup after a near-total collapse in the face of the IS assault on Mosul almost two years ago.
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told Iraqi TV that the armed forces had been “instructed to preserve the lives of citizens in Falluja and protect public and private property”.
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“The enemy is completely collapsing, our troops’ morale is very high, due to their victories and we believe that the battle of Falluja will be finished soon”, he said. He vowed to “tear up the black banners of strangers who usurped this city” and hoist the Iraqi flag.
