BAGHDAD: Iraqi forces battled militants making what looked increasingly like a last stand in Tikrit but the Islamic State group responded by vowing to expand its “caliphate”.
Thousands of fighters surrounded a few hundred holdout IS militants, pounding their positions from the air but treading carefully to avoid the thousands of bombs littering the city centre.
Two days after units spearheading Baghdad’s biggest anti-IS operation yet pushed deep into Tikrit, a police colonel claimed around 50% of the city was now back in government hands.
“We are surrounding the gunmen in the city centre. We’re advancing slowly due to the great number of IEDs (improvised explosive devices),” he said.
“We estimate there are 10,000 IEDs in the city.”
Massively outnumbered, the militants’ defence consists of a network of booby traps, roadside bombs and snipers through which suicide attackers occasionally ram car bombs into enemy targets.
“Six soldiers were killed and 11 wounded in a suicide car bomb this morning in Al-Dyum neighbourhood” in western Tikrit, the colonel said yesterday.
Tikrit was the hometown of dictator Saddam Hussein, remnants of whose Baath party collaborated with the militants when they took over almost a third of the country last June.
With crucial military backing from neighbouring Iran and a 60-nation US-led coalition, Baghdad has rolled back some of the losses.
It started with operations to secure the Syiah holy cities of Karbala and Najaf and bolster Baghdad’s defences, then worked its way north, retaking Diyala province earlier this year.
Commanders see the recapture of overwhelmingly Sunni Arab Tikrit as a stepping stone for the reconquest of second city Mosul further north, which once had a population of two million.
IS has countered every military loss lately by ramping up its propaganda war with ever more shocking acts, such as getting a child to execute a prisoner on camera or destroying heritage sites.
On Thursday, the group released a recording presented as a speech by spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani which marks the acceptance of a pledge of allegiance by Nigeria’s militant group Boko Haram.
Expansion is a pillar of IS doctrine and the group has recently declared new “provinces” in the Middle East and North Africa, albeit sometimes in places where it has a limited footprint.
Adnani shrugged off recent losses in Iraq and Syria, vowing to enter Rome, blow up the White House, Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower.
Some analysts have argued that months of battlefield setbacks and air strikes were taking a toll on IS and that some of its latest moves concealed growing desperation. — AFP/thestar
