AFP
Baghdad
Iraq vowed yesterday to reclaim the entire country from Islamist militants after having liberated the city of Tikrit, its biggest boost yet in the fight against the Islamic State group.
Speaking from a newly-secured area of central Tikrit, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said the government was “determined to liberate every inch of Iraqi land”.
Iraqi fighters picked their way through the rubble-strewn streets of the city, wary of any last-ditch attack from diehard IS fighters and of the thousands of bombs they left behind.
A major military push saw Iraqi police and allied forces retake the city centre on Tuesday but small pockets of militants remained.
A top leader in the Badr organisation, one of the most prominent Shia militias in Iraq, admitted that Tikrit had not been completely purged of jihadist fighters.
“Snipers are still there and many buildings are booby-trapped,” Karim al-Nuri said in the northern Tikrit neighbourhood of Qadisiya.
A commander for the Ketaeb Imam Ali militia said his men were involved in a firefight in the north of the city in the morning.
They “tried to advance on the university”, Rasul al-Abadi said, adding that there were “no more than 30” IS fighters left in the city’s vast Qadisiya district.
Interior Minister Mohamed Salem al-Ghaban told reporters during a visit to Tikrit that IS fighters had tried to cross the Tigris east of the city.
A paramilitary commander said they also launched an attack yesterday from a mountain hideout northeast of Tikrit in an attempt to open a safe passage to the town of Hawija for fleeing militants.
There has been concern that Iraq does not have enough specialised ordnance clearance teams to handle the quantity of traps left by IS fighters.
Ghaban said that security forces had so far found 185 rigged houses and 900 bombs planted on roads.
An official from the governor’s office said municipal teams were already at work in some reconquered neighbourhoods, cleaning debris and restoring power.
On Tuesday, Abadi claimed the city was liberated but the US-led coalition supporting Baghdad from the air said there was “still work to be done”.
Iraq’s top brass was training its sights on Mosul, which militants seized from the government at the same time as Tikrit in June last year.
Defence Minister Khaled al-Obeidi vowed yesterday to press on with offensive operations.
“We are coming, Anbar. We are coming, Nineveh,” he said in a recorded address, referring to the last two provinces still largely controlled by IS.
The loss of Tikrit further isolates Mosul, the capital of Nineveh and the main IS hub in Iraq, with Baghdad’s forces now poised to push north while Kurdish forces close in from the three other directions.
Zaid al-Ali, author of The Struggle For Iraq’s Future, said however that the fighting in Tikrit was made easier by the fact that the city was largely emptied of its population even before the operation began on March 2.
“Mosul still has a large civilian population, which will make things very complicated,” the analyst said.
The government has provided no information on how many fighters were killed, wounded or captured in the fighting but Baghdad’s forces are believed to have suffered heavy casualties.
Iraqi army and police forces, as well as volunteers and Iran-backed Shia militias, completely surrounded Tikrit within two weeks of launching the operation.
