DPA/Baghdad/Beirut

Islamic State militants were yesterday closing in on Ramadi, the capital city of Anbar province in western Iraq, forcing a mass exodus, officials said.
“Daesh is besieging Ramadi from all directions,” a member of Anbar’s provincial council, Azal al-Fahdawi, said using an Arabic acronym for the extremist group.
“Since Wednesday, the terrorist organisation has imposed its full control on the eastern side of Ramadi after a sudden retreat of security forces,” al-Fahdawi told DPA.
Islamic State’s push on Ramadi, located some 110km north of the capital Baghdad, is part of a counter-attack to a major offensive mounted by government troops and allied paramilitaries a week ago to drive the jihadists out of Anbar.
Local officials and tribal chiefs have in the past two days appealed to the central government to send military assistance to mostly Sunni Anbar to help in blocking jihadists’ advances.
“The military reinforcements and weapons dispatched to the province are not enough to foil the terrorists’ attacks and prevent its towns from falling,” al-Fahdawi said.
Anbar, Iraq’s largest province, stretches from Baghdad to the Syrian border.
The violence in Anbar has prompted hundreds of families to flee for safety in Baghdad, according to officials.
“More than 2,000 families from Anbar have arrived at the outskirts of the capital, waiting for shelter,” Riad al-Adad, who heads Baghdad’s local council, told Iraqi news site Almada Press.
He appealed to local and foreign organisations to assist Baghdad’s authorities in housing the displaced families.
The jihadists’ advances show that Islamic State is still a formidable force despite repeated attempts by the Iraqi government - backed by a US-led air campaign - to rout the radical Sunni group.
The recapture of the strategic northern city of Tikrit by government forces two weeks ago was seen as the first step ahead of the much more challenging task of regaining Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, from the extremists.
Islamic State has held large areas of Sunni-dominated northern and western Iraq since the Al Qaeda splinter group launched a lightning offensive in June that saw government forces collapse and flee. The hardline militia also rules vast territory of neighbouring war-torn Syria.
More than 220,000 people have been killed in Syria’s conflict since it started in 2011, a monitoring group said yesterday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it had documented 222,271 deaths since demonstrations against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad started in March 2011 and degenerated into a civil war.
Among the dead were 67,293 civilians, according to the Britain-based group, which said it compiled information from a network of activists across the war-torn country.
In addition to the civilian dead, the Observatory documented the deaths of more than 80,000 Syrian troops and pro-regime militiamen, including about 3,500 mainly Shia foreign fighters.
The watchdog said it had also documented the deaths of almost 40,000 rebel fighters and army defectors as well as more than 28,000 foreign jihadists.
The full toll probably exceeds 310,000, the Observatory said, because both the government and opposition conceal the full extent of their losses.

Iraq PM welcomes Iran aid, reiterates sovereignty
Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi yesterday welcomed Iran’s assistance in the fight against Islamic State jihadists, but warned Tehran to respect Baghdad’s sovereignty.
“Everything must be done through the government of Iraq,” Abadi told an audience of US policy experts at a Washington think tank on his first trip to the US as prime minister.
“We welcome the Iranian government’s support for us,” Abadi added, on the third day of a visit aimed at shoring up US support for his fledgling government as it battles the jihadists.
Washington says Iranian officers provided advice and artillery to Shia militias involved in the operation to retake the city of Tikrit from the Islamic State (IS) group in recent weeks.
Asked about the presence in Iraq of Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds force, the foreign operations arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Abadi stressed: “Iraqis were sacrificing to get their country.”
To say that “others are doing this on behalf of Iraqis, Iraqis wouldn’t accept that,” Abadi said.
“I very much dislike what’s been happening. I’ve been talking to the Iranians about it,” he insisted.
“The state must be there, people must believe that democracy works.”
The Iraqi prime minister met Tuesday with US President Barack Obama, having said he intended to ask for a “marked increase” in heavy weapons for his forces to repel IS, which has captured a swathe of territory in Iraq and Syria.
Speaking at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Abadi denied however that he had come to Washington with a shopping list of weapons.
But he said he had received assurances that a number of F16 planes would be delivered on time.
Abadi also said two Iraqi brigades were to start training to retake Anbar province from the jihadists and would need heavy weapons for the fight, adding in Arabic that the US administration appeared to be “co-operative.”
After meeting with Abadi, Obama said the allies were “making serious progress” in pushing back the jihadists and thanked Abadi for living up to his commitment to make Iraq’s government more inclusive.
But he made no mention of whether the US was prepared to send more arms into Iraq.
“Success won’t occur overnight,” Obama said, “but what is clear is that we will be successful.”
Abadi has announced that Baghdad’s next battle against the Islamic State group is to retake Anbar, Iraq’s largest province, which shares a border with jihadist-held territory in Syria.