He urges the Iraqi government to deploy sufficient military forces in Ramadi to make sure that the city will not be retaken by the terrorists. American and Italian military trainers in Iraq have already trained about 100 Sunni police officers to serve in Ramadi, along with “several thousand” Sunni tribesmen, according to a USA military official.
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The main reason to introduce this scheme is to bring the Indian capital city’s hazardous level of pollution under control. As per rough estimates, around 50,000 trucks enter Delhi every day, contributing to pollution levels in the city.
Iraqi forces, backed by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes, were long stalled in their efforts to retake territory, but have made recent gains.
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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region-The convoy of Iraq’s Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi came under rocket fire in Ramadi shortly after he arrived to salute Iraqi forces for the city’s recapture.
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The former government headquarters in Ramadi was the epicentre of the fighting but Iraqi forces did not rush in when ISIS pulled out because the entire area was rigged.
Soldiers were shown on state television on Monday publicly slaughtering a sheep in an act of celebration.
Abadi says government troops will next liberate the northern city of Mosul. Iraqi forces flew the national flag above the main government complex in Ramadi earlier in the day, declaring they had recaptured the city, a provincial capital west of Baghdad which fell to Islamic State fighters in May.
But General Ismail al-Mahlawi, head of military operations in Anbar, quickly clarified that government forces had only retaken a strategic government complex and that parts of the city remained under IS control.
Fighters brandishing rifles danced in Ramadi as top commanders paraded through the streets after recapturing the city they lost to IS in May.
The fighters seized it in May after government troops fled in a defeat which prompted Washington to take a hard look at strategy in its ongoing air war against the militants. “We do not want for the security forces to advance because if they do so there will be losses”, he said, “so we are trying to remove all the IEDs and explosives before entering the go vernmental compound”.
Al-Belawi said the fighters retreated mainly to the eastern neighborhoods of Sijariya and Sufiya.
Authorities have not provided casualty figures from the fighting or Ramadi.
“If 2015 was a year of liberation, 2016 will be the year of great victories, terminating the presence of Daesh (IS) in Iraq and Mesopotamia”, he said in a televised address.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi delivered a speech in which he hailed the advance, saying it had killed “hundreds” of militants and “fulfilled the promise to defeat Daesh in Ramadi”, referring to the IS group by its Arabic acronym.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry congratulated Iraqi forces for “displaying tremendous perseverance and courage”.
Nineveh is home to Iraq’s second city of Mosul, from which Daesh chief Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi proclaimed his “caliphate” straddling Iraq and Syria more than a year and a half ago.
The army’s apparent capture of Ramadi, capital of Anbar province in the Euphrates River valley west of Baghdad, marks a milestone for the forces which crumbled when the hardline Sunni Muslim militants seized a third of Iraq in June 2014.
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Ramadi and Fallujah, Sunni Arab cities where distrust of the Shiite-led government runs deep, were major bastions of the insurgency in the years after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
