Tag Archives: Falluja

U.S. allies target Islamic State in Falluja

File photo of Iraqi soldiers firing a rocket toward Islamic State militants on the outskirt of the Makhmour south of Mosul

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States and its allies said they targeted Islamic State on Wednesday with two dozen strikes in Iraq, including four near Falluja, where Iraqi forces have launched a recent effort to retake the city from the militant group.

The strikes in the city west of Baghdad hit three Islamic State tactical units and two tunnels used by the group as well as four vehicles, an artillery piece, a weapons cache and three fighting positions, the coalition leading the operations said in a statement released on Thursday.

Other strikes included five near Mosul, another city where Iraqi forces, with support from the coalition, are working to retake control in the country’s northern region. Targets near the cities of Habbaniya, Haditha, Hit, Qayyara, Sinjar, Sultan Abdalla and Tal Afar, the Combined Joint Task Force said.

Separately, in Syria, five U.S.-led strikes near four cities also hit five Islamic state fighting units, among other targets, it said.

(Reporting by Washington newsroom Editing by W Simon)

Iraq forces keep up shelling Falluja, U.N. concern mounts for civilians

Members of the Iraqi security forces load a machine gun near Falluja, Iraq, May 23, 2016.

By Ahmed Rasheed and Stephen Kalin

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraqi forces shelled Islamic State targets in Falluja on Tuesday, the second day of an assault to retake the militant stronghold just west of Baghdad, as international concern mounted for the security of civilians.

Residents in the city, 50 km (30 miles) from the capital, reported sporadic shelling around the city centre, but said it was less intense than on Monday.

“No one can leave. It’s dangerous. There are snipers everywhere along the exit routes,” one resident told Reuters by internet.

About 100,000 civilians are estimated to be in Falluja which, in January 2014, became the first Iraqi city to be captured by Islamic State, six months before the group declared its caliphate. The population was three times bigger before the war.

The Iraqi military said it had dislodged the militants from Garma, a village to the east, overnight. No casualties were reported by the army or the city’s main hospital. On Monday, eight civilians and three militants were killed, and 25 people wounded, 20 of them civilians, according to the hospital.

CIVILIANS

The U.S.-led coalition “is providing air power to support the Iraqi government forces in Falluja,” its spokesman, U.S. Army Col. Steve Warren, told Reuters by phone.

The United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross issued statements on Monday evening appealing for the warring parties to protect civilians, who have limited access to food, water and healthcare and who now risk being used as human shields.

Resourceful residents have begun appropriating solar panels affixed to street lights to generate power in their homes.

Even the militants have had to scrounge and conserve supplies, collecting plastic objects to turn into makeshift fuel and conducting patrols on bicycle, residents told Reuters.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said the armed forces had been “instructed to preserve the lives of citizens in Falluja and protect public and private property.”

“Those who cannot take the exit routes, they can stay at home and not move,” he added in comments aired by state Iraqi TV while on visit to the field command center near Falluja.

The Association of Muslim Scholars of Iraq, a hardline political organisation formed in 2003 to represent minority Sunnis, on Monday condemned the campaign as “an unjust aggression, a reflection of the vengeful spirit that the forces of evil harbour against this city”.

It said in a statement nearly 10,000 residents had been killed or wounded by government shelling over the past two years, which Reuters could not verify, and warned any victory would be “illusory”.

The military campaign could take “many weeks, if not longer”, predicted Ranj Alaaldin, an Iraq expert at the London School of Economics, due to lingering support for Islamic State among many residents who may still prefer the militants to a Baghdad government long perceived as sectarian and repressive.

In a nod to local sensitivities, Iraqi officials say Shi’ite militias, grouped under a loose government umbrella to help boost the army and police following partial collapses since 2014, would be restricted to operating outside the city limits.

Abadi ordered the offensive despite concerns that it could divert resources from a push later this year to retake Mosul, Islamic State’s de facto capital in Iraq.

“You do not need Falluja in order to get Mosul,” Warren, the anti-IS coalition spokesman, said in a phone interview at the weekend.

A series of bombings that killed more than 150 people in one week in Baghdad, the highest death toll so far this year. cranked up the pressure on Abadi to do something about the city seen by many Shi’ite politicians as an irredeemable bulwark of Sunni Muslim militancy.

“The intelligence indicates that this recent IS resurgence in Baghdad through some sleeper cells originated from Falluja,” said senior lawmaker and former national security adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie. “Falluja is too close to Baghdad.”

Reuters could not independently verify that claim and the authorities have not publicly made such statements.

(Additional reporting by Saif Hameed; Writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Richard Balmforth)

Iraqi forces clash with ISIS near Falluja

Shi'ite fighters forces launch a rocket towards Islamic State militants on the outskirts Falluja

By Ahmed Rasheed and Stephen Kalin

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraqi government forces fought Islamic State militants near Falluja on Monday and bombarded central districts at the outset of an offensive to retake the longtime jihadist stronghold on the western approaches to the capital Baghdad.

Some of the first direct clashes occurred in al-Hayakil area on Falluja’s southern outskirts, a resident said. Iraqi troops also approached the northern suburb of Garma, the top municipal official there said, to clear out militants before turning their attention toward the city center.

Air strikes and mortar salvoes overnight targeted neighborhoods inside the city proper where Islamic State is believed to maintain its headquarters, but the bombardment had eased by daybreak.

Iraqi military spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Rasool, speaking on state television, described the government’s advance as “careful” and reliant on engineers to dismantle roadside bombs planted by the militants.

Falluja, a longtime bastion of Sunni Muslim jihadists 50 km (30 miles) from Baghdad, was the first city to fall to Islamic State, in January 2014. Six months later, the group declared a caliphate spanning large parts of Iraq and neighboring Syria.

Iraqi forces have surrounded Falluja since last year but focused most combat operations on IS-held territories further west and north. The authorities have pledged to retake Mosul, the north’s biggest city, this year in keeping with a U.S. plan to oust IS from their de facto capitals in Iraq and Syria.

But the Falluja operation, which is not considered a military prerequisite for advancing on Mosul, could push back that timeline. Two offensives by U.S. forces against al Qaeda insurgents in Falluja in 2004 each lasted about a month and wrecked significant portions of the city.

There are currently between 500 and 700 IS militants in Falluja, according to a recent U.S. military estimate.

Iraqi army helicopters were rocketing IS positions in nearby Garma and targeting movement in and out of the area in order to weaken resistance enough for ground troops to enter, Mayor Ahmed Mukhlif told Reuters.

The defense minister and army chief of staff visited part of that northern axis on Monday, a ministry statement said.

POPULATED CITY

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, also grappling with political and economic crises in the OPEC member state, visited a command center set up nearby to oversee operations, exchanging his suit for the black uniform of an elite commando unit.

Announcing the offensive in a late-night speech, Abadi said it would be conducted by the army, police, counter-terrorism forces, local tribal allies and a coalition of mostly Shi’ite Muslim militias.

Iraqi officials say the militias, including ones backed by Shi’ite power Iran, may be restricted to operating outside the city limits, as they largely did in the successful battle to retake the Anbar provincial capital of Ramadi six months ago, to avoid aggravating sectarian tensions with Sunni residents.

State television aired footage of armored vehicles sitting among palm groves on Falluja’s outskirts, a green tracer glow emanating from shell and machine gun fire. A family stood in the daylight outside a simple one-storey home, cheering and waving a white flag as a military convoy passed by.

Iraqi and U.S. officials estimate there are as many as 100,000 civilians still in Falluja, a city on the Euphrates river whose population was three times that size before the war. A six-month siege has created acute shortages of food and medicine, pushing the city toward a humanitarian crisis.

The Baghdad government has called on civilians to flee and said it would open safe corridors to southern areas, but roadside bombs have prevented most of them from leaving.

The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said 80 families that managed to flee in recent days via a main road or through agricultural fields were undergoing screening by the security forces.

It said in a statement that at least three people had been killed trying to escape while 10,000 families were stuck inside “in a very precarious situation”.

Residents living in central Falluja said they had moved at dawn to relative safety in outlying northern areas but Islamic State patrols have since begun limiting movement even between neighborhoods.

Militants were also using mosque loudspeakers to urge civilians to donate blood, residents said.

(Additional reporting by Saif Hameed; Writing by Stephen Kalin; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

U.N. says food situation in Iraq’s Falluja extremely worrying

A displaced Iraqi child, who fled from Islamic State violence from Saqlawiyah, near Falluja, is seen in the town of Khalidiya, north of Baghdad

GENEVA (Reuters) – The food situation for 60,000 civilians trapped in the besieged Iraqi city of Falluja is extremely worrying and likely to deteriorate unless aid gets into the city, the U.N. World Food Programme said on Monday.

The Iraqi army, police and Iranian-backed Shi’ite Muslim militias – backed by air strikes from a U.S.-led coalition – have maintained a near total siege on the Islamic State-held city, which is located 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad, since late last year

“As the siege continued in Falluja for the third consecutive month, no sign of improvement was recorded in March; food prices remain extremely high, and stocks in shops and households are depleting. In March, the price of wheat was six times more expensive than in December,” the report said.

“For the third consecutive month, respondents from Hay Alwahda sub-district reported that shops and markets had exhausted all food supplies including wheat, sugar, rice, vegetable oil and lentils,” the report said.

The report was based on a mobile phone survey conducted in March. But it said reaching respondents had become increasingly difficult and very limited information was available, especially as armed opposition groups had shut down transmitter towers to stop people using mobile phones.

“Aid has not reached Falluja since the government recaptured nearby Ramadi in December 2015, with supply routes cut off by Iraqi forces and the armed groups preventing civilians from leaving,” the report said.

There were reports that people wanting to leave the city and seek safety were unable to do so, it said.

Last week a report from New York-based Human Rights Watch said desperate residents were making soup from grass and using ground date seeds to make flour for bread.

(Reporting by Tom Miles, editing by Richard Balmforth)