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Iraqi army claims to have recaptured Isis stronghold of Hawija Hawija: Iraqi army says it has recaptured one of last Isis enclaves
(35 minutes later)
Iraqi forces say they have retaken the centre of the Islamic State stronghold of Hawija and are pushing forward in their assault on one of the remaining Isis enclaves in the country. The Iraqi army says its forces have captured the town of Hawija and the surrounding area from Islamic State, though some fighting still raged in a pocket to the north and east of the town where the militants were surrounded.
Troops, police and paramilitaries “liberated the whole of the centre of Hawija and are continuing their advance”, the operation’s commander, Lt Gen Abdel Amir Yarallah, said. Hawija is the militants’ last stronghold in northern Iraq. If confirmed, its capture will mean the only area that remains under control of Isis in Iraq will be a stretch alongside the western border with Syria. Hawija is near the Kurdish-held oil city of Kirkuk.
Government and allied forces, backed by a US-led coalition, launched an offensive last month to oust Isis from Hawija, a longtime insurgent bastion. “The army’s 9th armoured division, the Federal Police, the Emergency Response division and … Popular Mobilisation liberated Hawija,” said the joint operations commander, Lt Gen Abdul Ameer Rasheed Yarallah.
The town is among the final holdouts from the territory seized by the jihadis in 2014 and its recapture would leave only a handful of remote outposts in Isis’s hands. The offensive on Hawija was carried out by US-backed Iraqi government troops and Iranian-trained and armed Shia paramilitary groups known as Popular Mobilisation.
The UN said on Tuesday that an estimated 12,500 people had fled the town since the launch of the offensive to retake Hawija and surrounding areas. The capture of Hawija brings them into direct contact with Kurdish peshmerga fighters who control Kirkuk, a multi-ethnic region claimed by both Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).
The UN’s humanitarian affairs office said the number of people still in the town was unknown but could be up to 78,000. Kirkuk became as a flashpoint last month when the KRG included the city in a referendum on Kurdish independence in northern Iraq.
It said humanitarian agencies had set up checkpoints, camps and emergency sites capable of receiving more than 70,000 people who could flee. Iraq launched its offensive on 21 September to dislodge Isis from the Hawija area, where up to 78,000 people were estimated to be trapped, according to the UN.
Hawija, 140 miles (230km) north of Baghdad, is one of just two significant areas of Iraq still held by Isis, along with a stretch of the Euphrates valley near the Syrian border which is also under attack. The militants continue to control the border town of al-Qaim and the region surrounding it. They also hold parts of the Syrian side of the border, but the area under their control is shrinking as they retreat in the face of two different sets of hostile forces – a US-backed, Kurdish-led coalition and Syrian government troops with foreign Shia militias backed by Iran and Russia.
Isis’s cross-border “caliphate” collapsed in July, when US-backed Iraqi forces captured Mosul, the group’s de facto capital in Iraq, in a nine-month battle.
Last week the group released an audio recording of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who declared the caliphate from Mosul in mid-2014, indicating he was alive, after several reports he had been killed. He urged his followers to keep up the fight despite the setbacks.