RAF air strikes aided the Iraqi push to retake the city of Ramadi from Islamic State control, the Ministry of Defence said after operations in the region continued at “high intensity” during the festive period in the UK. Gen. Yahya Rasoul said: “Ramadi has been liberated [from Daesh] and counterterrorism troops have raised the Iraqi flag on the government complex in Anbar”.
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Security was tightened around the area, which is popular among foreigners and home to shops, bars and some embassies, on Thursday. Last year, 31 people died in a knife attack at a station in Kunming, a city in the southwest of the country.
“By controlling the complex this means that we have defeated them in Ramadi”, said Sabah al-Numani, a spokesman for government forces.
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His future in the game, however, depends heavily on a workout today at the Denver Broncos practice facility. If the results from his workout on Saturday are not good, the decision might be made for him.
The Iraqi military launched a long-promised campaign to retake the city, located about 130 kilometers (80 miles) west of Baghdad, last week.
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New Year’s Day is forecast to be brighter, colder and showery with a touch of frost, flawless for a New Year’s Day walk. Two of the warnings are status orange and two are status yellow. “The previous wettest was December 2014 with 390.4mm”.
Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has congratulated Prime Minister Abadi and the government of Iraq on their progress in retaking Ramadi today. Washington had hoped that a potentially decisive battle for that city would take place in 2015 but it was pushed back after the fighters seized Ramadi in May.
“The coalition will continue to support the government of Iraq as they move forward to make Ramadi safe for civilians to return and as the military moves to fight ISIL in other areas of the country”, he continued, using an alternative acronym for the Islamic State group.
The army on Sunday announced it had seized the center of Ramadi from Islamic State, scoring its first major victory against the militant group that swept through a third of Iraq in 2014.
“We are coming to liberate Mosul and it will be the fatal and final blow to Daesh”, he added.
On Dec. 22, U.S.-led coalition spokesman Col. Steve Warren noted that there was no Shia militia taking part in the offensive on Ramadi. It fell to the Islamic State in May. Warren back then said that once the city is taken back, security will be assured by Sunni tribal fighters as well as the Anbar police – the local force that has been trained by Italian Carabinieri coalition partners.
As the fighting in Ramadi continues, a new CNN/ORC poll indicates that Americans are more likely to say that terrorists are winning the war against the United States than they have been at any point since the September 11 attacks.
Iraq’s government says the next target will be the northern city of Mosul, by far the largest population centre under ISIL control.
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Security officials said the forces still need to clear some pockets of insurgents in the city and its outskirts. It declared a “caliphate” to rule over all Muslims from territory there and in Syria, carrying out mass killings and imposing a draconian form of Islam.
