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Situation in Ramadi:
RAMADI , Iraq - Terrified families waved white flags as they
emerged from homes reduced to rubble in the Iraqi city of Ramadi, where
government troops were still battling Islamic State fighters holed up on
Friday, five days after the army recaptured the city center.
The provincial capital in the fertile Euphrates River
valley west of Baghdad is the biggest city to have been recaptured from
Islamic State, and the first retaken by Iraq's army since it collapsed
in the path of the militants' advance 18 months ago.
The victory has been hailed as a turning point by the
Iraqi government, which says its rebuilt army will soon march on Islamic
State's main Iraqi stronghold Mosul further north, and defeat the group
in Iraq in 2016.
As an Iraqi army column advanced through the ruined city, an elderly
woman emerged from a home waving a white flag on the end of a stick.
Soon, she was followed by children, a wounded woman being pushed in a
wheelbarrow and men carrying small children in their arms. They flinched
as explosions could be heard in the distance.
"They (Islamic State) are not Muslims, they are beasts,"
one of the men rescued from the central district told a Reuters
television cameraman accompanying the advancing Iraqi column."We thank our security forces, from the soldiers to the
generals. They saved us," the man said before breaking into tears.
Another man told Reuters television that the fighters had
killed seven people who refused to come with them to another district
where they were making a stand.
Major Salam Hussein told Reuters television that the
militants were using families as human shields. More than 52 families
had been rescued so far in the city, he said.
Another military officer, reached by telephone from the
battlefield, said security forces were using loudspeakers to urge
civilians to head toward the advancing troops, before calling air
strikes from a U.S.-led coalition on residential blocks still held by
the militants.
The presence of civilians was delaying the advance of the troops
eastward from the central district they captured on Sunday, where the
provincial government is located, the officer said."Warplanes do not
strike any target in central Ramadi unless they are sure there are no
civilians nearby," said the officer. BIGGEST SUCCESS
The Iraqi military are now slowly securing the city.
The victory in Ramadi, which was captured by Islamic State
fighters in May, was by far the biggest success for Iraq's army since
it fled in the face of the fighters' lightning advance across a third of
Iraq in 2014, abandoning its American armor. Islamic State, also known by the English acronyms ISIS or ISIL or the Arabic acronym Daesh, has declared a "caliphate" to rule over all Muslims from territory it controls in both Iraq and Syria.
The fighters have imposed an ultra-hardline version of
Sunni Islam disavowed by all major Sunni authorities, and carried out
mass killings and rapes. Most regional and world powers have joined the
battle against them, often backing rival groups in complex, multi-sided
civil wars in both Iraq and Syria that make it difficult to achieve
international unity.
The United States is leading a coalition with European countries
and major Arab states that has been striking Islamic State targets from
the air, but a central challenge has been rebuilding the Iraqi army into
a force capable of capturing and holding territory on the ground.
Previous battles were fought with the army playing a
supporting role behind Iranian-backed Shi'ite militia fighters, although
this risked alienating Sunni Muslim residents in Islamic State-held
areas. A key
part of the strategy for the government is to put Ramadi in the hands of
local Sunni tribal figures, an echo of the 2006-2007 "surge" campaign
by U.S. forces at the height of the 2003-2011 U.S. war in Iraq, in which
Washington secured the help of Sunni tribes against a precursor of
Islamic State.
Provincial police chief Brigadier Hadi Rizaiyj said police were
investigating males who remained behind in Ramadi to determine whether
they had links with Islamic State."The counter-terrorism forces are
freeing civilians in distress and delivering them to the Anbar province
police; the police then have names of wanted people," Rizaiyj said. "If
we can prove that a civilian had a brother fighting with Daesh and he
helped him with information or something similar, then we keep him with
us" before turning them over to the judiciary on terrorism charges, he
said. Some 4 million people have fled Islamic State-held territory in Iraq, most of them Sunni Muslims.
Iraq's most senior Shi'ite cleric, Ali al-Sistani, whose
strong backing for the campaign against Islamic State has helped rally
Shi'ites behind Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's government, called for
local tribes to be enlisted to prevent Islamic State fighters from
returning to recaptured areas.
"Bringing home the displaced people should be done
according to a mechanism," said a sermon read out by Sistani's
representative Sheikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbalai in the holy Shi'ite city
of Kerbala. "Security forces, together with the residents of these areas and the
tribes, should coordinate to ensure that the terrorist gangs cannot
return again and form sleeper cells that constitute a danger."
Personal Notes:
The situation is still unstable but the city is under the Iraqi banner, the Islamic State militants tried to make believe they took back the city by attacking successfully a little base situated in north of Ramadi with massive VBIED (Car bombs) suicide bombers attacks.
But the main city is now under the Iraqi forces control!
They also posted old videos pretending to be in the center of Ramadi exactly like they did in Kobane when they've posted a video of John Cantlie forcing him to say they had Kobane under control while they were already defeated !
You can as always understand in the video the suffering of civilians telling to the world how they suffered to be under the Tyranny of Daesh militants ...
And once again civilians were used as human shield cowardly to slow down the progression of Iraqi forces and tones of explosives have been installed by Daesh as well to slow down the Iraqi forces ...
But of course these explosives devices with a massive power will not hurt civilians according to the Daesh militants hypocrites ...
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