Iraq forces struggle to breach IS-held Fallujah

Near Fallujah / AFP

Iraqi forces struggled on Wednesday to break into Fallujah city centre where hundreds of fighters from the IS group and some 50,000 increasingly desperate civilians were holed up.
Fighting also raged hundreds of kilometres further up the Euphrates Valley in Syria, as US-backed Kurdish and Arab fighters opened a new front against the extremists in the strategic Manbij pocket on the Turkish border.
Elite Iraqi forces positioned on the edge of Fallujah, one of IS’s historical strongholds, met fierce resistance from besieged jihadists seemingly condemned to making a suicidal last stand.
“Our forces are still pushing to break into the city centre but there is tough resistance from IS,” said Lieutenant General Abdelwahab Al Saadi,
the overall commander of the
operation.
After a week of shaping operations aimed at sealing the siege of Fallujah, which lies just 50 kilometres (30 miles) west of Baghdad, elite forces launched a new, more aggressive phase on Monday morning.
But they have so far been unable to reach the city centre and battle IS fighters in the streets.
“Every time our forces try to push in, they encounter really tough defence systems set up by IS,” said a police colonel, speaking on the outskirts of Fallujah.
The closest Iraqi forces have come to moving into the centre is from the south, where they entered a suburb of Fallujah but were pinned back by a massive counterattack on Tuesday.
Iraqi commanders claim they have killed dozens of IS fighters since the start of the operation on May 22-23 but have been coy about releasing their own casualty figures.
Yet the number of coffins being sent back to some of Iraq’s southern provinces and of burials reported in the Shiite Muslim holy city of Najaf suggest that the anti-IS camp is also paying a heavy price.
“Since the start of the operation, we have received about 70 martyrs, probably a bit more,” said a member of the security forces posted outside Najaf’s Valley of Peace, the world’s largest cemetery, where many from Iraq’s Shiite majority bury their dead.
Officials in Basra said the southern province had lost 26 fighters from the Hashed Al Shaabi paramilitary force alone. An official in Najaf province, who did not want his name to be published, confirmed 12 deaths from the province.
Medics also reported many wounded from the battle for Fallujah. Since Monday, just two of the capital’s hospitals received 97.
Inside Fallujah, tens of thousands of trapped residents were under increasing pressure from worsening shortages and nervous IS fighters preparing for a desperate holdout.
The United Nations Children’s Fund said at least 20,000 of them were thought to be children, most vulnerable to dire living conditions and to forced recruitment as fighters.
“Children who are recruited see their lives and futures jeopardised as they are forced to carry and use arms, fighting in an adult war,” the agency’s Iraq representative Peter Hawkins said.

Syria offensive
No aid has reached Fallujah since September last year and residents have been living on dates, dirty water from the Euphrates and animal feed.
Many Iraqi officers expect IS to put up more of a fight for Fallujah than some of the other cities they have lost in Iraq, such as Tikrit and Ramadi.
Fallujah is one of only two major cities they still control in the country—the other being —and it looms large in modern jihadist mythology.
In November 2004, it took 10,000 highly trained US troops backed by the best in military technology more than six weeks to defeat extremists in Fallujah, suffering some of their worst battle losses since the Vietnam War.
IS has been on the back foot in Iraq, losing much of the territory it seized in 2014. But it has also come under growing pressure in the Syrian part of the “caliphate” it proclaimed two years ago.
A US-backed alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters launched an offensive against IS-held territory along the Turkish border that is seen as a main entry point for foreign fighters.
The advance brought the Syrian Democratic Forces to within 18 kilometres (11 miles) of Manbij, a strategic town held by IS since 2014 which was hit by intensive US-led coalition air strikes, the Syrian Observatory for Human Right said.

20,000 children are trapped, warns UN 

BAGHDAD / AP

The UN children’s fund on Wednesday issued a stark warning to Iraqi troops and IS militants in the battle for Fallujah to spare the children, the most vulnerable among the tens of thousands of civilians who remain trapped by the fighting for control of this city west of Baghdad.
Backed by aerial support from the US-led coalition and paramilitary forces mainly made up of Shiite militias, Iraqi government troops more than a week ago launched a military operation to recapture Fallujah which has been under control of the extremist group for more than two years.
As the battled unfolded more than 50,000 people are believed to be trapped inside the Sunni majority city, about 65 kilometers west of Baghdad. The UNICEF estimated the number of the children trapped with their families inside the city at about 20,000, warning that they face a dire humanitarian situation, in addition to the risk of forced recruitment into the fighting by the IS militants.
“Children who are forcibly recruited into the fighting see their lives and futures jeopardized as they are forced to carry and use arms, fighting an adults’ war,” the organization said in a statement. It called on “all parties to protect children inside Fallujah” and “provide safe passage to those wishing to leave the city.”
Fallujah was the first large city in Iraq to fall to IS and it is the last major urban area controlled by the extremist group in western Iraq. The Sunni-led militants still control the country’s second-largest city, Mosul, in the north, as well as smaller towns and patches of territory in the country’s west and north. The fight for Fallujah is expected to be protracted because the IS group has had more than two years to dig in. Hidden bombs are believed to be strewn throughout the city, and the presence of trapped civilians will limit the use of supporting airstrikes.

2 US soldiers wounded

Washington / AFP

Two US troops were wounded over the weekend in separate IS attacks in Iraq and Syria, Pentagon officials said. The casualty in Syria marks the first time an American soldier has been injured in that country since military advisors deployed there at the end of last year.
Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis said the soldier was wounded by “indirect fire” north of Raqa, the extremists’ de facto capital.
The Iraqi incident occurred near in northern Iraq near the city of Erbil, also by indirect fire, Davis said. He stressed the troops was “not on the front line” and “were not engaged in active combat.”
But Defense Secretary Ashton Carter later told reporters that “of course” the troops were in fact in combat. President Barack Obama has repeatedly assured the American public there would be no US combat boots on the ground in Iraq or Syria, but troops are edging ever closer to the front lines, leading many to question what constitutes “combat” versus simply advising local partner forces.