The Sunni extremist group has controlled the city, located about 65 kilometres west of Baghdad, for more than two years.
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Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi met with commanders near Fallujah on Wednesday and instructed forces to protect civilians, according to state television.
A member of the Iraqi government forces monitors the front line near the village of al-Azraqiyah, northwest of the city of Fallujah, on June 5, 2016, during an operation to regain control of the area from the Islamic State (IS) group. Extensive use of tunnels, well-trained snipers and roadside bombs placed by the militant group slowed the initial push into the city.
“We were surprised that they treated us so well”, said a man at a camp who was in his 50s and gave his name as Abu Muhammad.
“The situation inside Fallujah is not stable”, he told NBC News.
But the accusations also reinforce Iraq’s deep sectarian and tribal rifts, which could complicate further fights to dislodge the Islamic State, including from its key base in northern Iraq.
“The Iraqi security forces have not stalled”, Volesky said.
Maj. Gen. Gary Volesky, the USA commander in Iraq, defended the performance of Iraqi forces in the operation, saying they were playing a larger role than the Shiite militias in leading the isolation of Fallujah.
Unlike previous anti-IS operations, the fight for Fallujah involves an array of Iraqi security forces.
Falluja would be the third major city in Iraq recaptured by the government after former leader Saddam Hussein’s hometown Tikrit and Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s western Anbar province.
Two days after taking up positions on the outskirts of Fallujah, one such dispute brought operations to a halt on Tuesday.
Some 50,000 civilians – including 20,000 children – remained trapped inside Falluja, according to a United Nations estimate. “We have no choice but to be victorious”, Assad said to applause. “The shedding of blood will not end until we uproot terrorism, wherever it is”.
The accounts – which could not be independently verified – highlight the apparent desperation of the militants to hang onto the city, their closest main foothold to Baghdad.
Assad’s army, with Russian air support, has also launched its own offensive against Islamic State, in what a pro-Damascus newspaper in Lebanon characterised last week as a “race to Raqqa” – to capture territory around Islamic State’s de facto Syrian capital before the area falls to US allies.
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Information for this article was contributed by Susannah George, Albert Aji, Bassem Mroue and Matthew Lee of The Associated Press and by Hugh Naylor and Mustafa Salim of The Washington Post.
