This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/17/iraqi-forces-retake-main-government-compound-falluja-isis-offensive

The article has changed 7 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 1 Version 2
Iraqi forces retake main government compound in Falluja from Isis Iraqi forces seize key district in Falluja from Isis
(about 5 hours later)
Iraqi troops say they have retaken the main government compound in Falluja, in a breakthrough in the fourth week of an offensive against Islamic State’s stronghold. Iraqi forces have seized a key district in the embattled city of Falluja, hoisting the country’s flag on top of a municipal complex as they battled to dislodge Islamic State from the centre of one of its most important strongholds.
Elite federal forces met limited resistance from Isis fighters, who are redeploying on the western outskirts of the city, military commanders said. The rapid advance appears to have led to a fresh exodus of refugees from the shattered city. The Norwegian Refugee Council, which runs displaced persons camps outside Falluja, warned that a major humanitarian crisis was unfolding and it was running out of food and water for 15,000 people now in the camps.
“The counter-terrorism service and the rapid response forces have retaken the government compound in the centre of Falluja,” the operation’s overall commander, Lt Gen Abdul-Wahab al-Saadi, said. “We have a humanitarian disaster inside Falluja and another unfolding disaster in the camps,” said Jan Egeland, the NRC’s secretary general. “Thousands fleeing the cross-fire after months of besiegement and near starvation deserve relief and care, but our relief supplies will soon be exhausted. The humanitarian community needs immediate funding to avoid a completely avoidable disaster on our watch.”
Raed Shaker Jawdat, Iraq’s federal police chief, confirmed the advance. “The liberation of the government compound, which is the main landmark in the city, symbolises the restoration of the state’s authority [in Falluja],” he said. A tough battle still lies ahead for the elite counter-terrorism force leading the offensive into the city, home to 90,000 civilians before the campaign and an entrenched Isis presence. But the hard-fought advance into the centre of Falluja, long a hotbed of insurgency and one of the first cities in Iraq to fall under Issis control, is a symbolic victory weeks into a gruelling campaign that has stalled in recent days.
It now appears inevitable that the city will be wrested from the militants’ grasp, allowing more people to flee to the advancing Iraqi troops. But how long the battle will last and how much of Falluja will be destroyed remains to be seen: the recently liberated cities of Ramadi and Sinjar were levelled in the effort to expel the terror group.
Related: The battle for Falluja: 'If they lose it, Isis is finished'Related: The battle for Falluja: 'If they lose it, Isis is finished'
The government lost control of Falluja in 2014, months before Isis took Iraq’s second city, Mosul, and swept across large parts of the country. “The liberation of the government compound, which is the main landmark in the city, symbolises the restoration of the state’s authority” in Falluja, said Raed Shaker Jawdat, Iraq’s federal police chief, according to Agence France Presse. US-led coalition war planes continued to bomb Isis positions inside the city, the Iraqi ministry of defence said.
Falluja, which is 31 miles (50km) west of Baghdad, is one of Isis’s most emblematic strongholds; its loss would leave Mosul as the only major Iraqi city under the group’s control. In the hours before the latest push into the heart of Falluja, Iraqi forces retook several neighbourhoods in the south and east, giving them control of almost 50% of the city. The rapid advance into the city centre and the reopening of the highway from Baghdad amid apparently little resistance from the militants seemed to herald a new phase in the battle, which is turning in the government’s favour.
“This operation was done with little resistance from Daesh,” Saadi said, using the Arabic acronym for Isis. “There is a mass flight of Daesh to the west that explains this lack of resistance. There are only pockets of them left and we are hunting them down.” Isis supporters had bragged on encrypted social media platforms about the length of the campaign, which Iraqi officials promised would lead to a swift victory but has dragged on for three weeks. But there was little reaction on their media channels to the Iraqi government’s advance on Friday.
Security officials said many Isis members had managed to slip out of the city by blending in with fleeing civilians in recent days, in some cases paying off security forces. “The top leaders are mostly gone and those left behind to defend the city are not their best fighters, which explains their performance,” said a security officer speaking on condition of anonymity. Humanitarian organisations said thousands of families had arrived on Thursday at the camps in Amriyat al-Falluja, near the city, fleeing on foot in the 50C (122F) heat of the Iraqi desert.
Tens of thousands of civilians have been forced from their homes since the start of the operation last month. The first to escape were those living in rural outlying areas, in the early phase of the operation in which several Iraqi forces sealed the siege of the city. It is unclear how many civilians remain in the besieged city. Isis fighters have been accused of using civilians as human shields and preventing them from escaping, and some have been killed while attempting to do so.
Others have been arrested by paramilitary groups who worry that Isis fighters are trying to flee by blending in with civilians. The involvement of the paramilitaries, members of the predominantly Shia Popular Mobilisation Units, had sparked fears of sectarian reprisals. They had been accused of a wide range of abuses in other liberation campaigns.
A representative of grand ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the supreme Shia religious authority in Iraq, urged fighters to avoid revenge killings and to protect the innocents, during his Friday sermon.
Related: Civilians flee the offensive on Falluja – in picturesRelated: Civilians flee the offensive on Falluja – in pictures
City centre residents had been trapped in dire conditions for days, but recent advances have allowed many of them to escape. The collapse or retreat in Falluja is the latest in a string of setbacks for Isis, which has come under sustained pressure on multiple fronts in Syria and Iraq. The militants are close to losing a key foothold in Syria, with US-backed Kurdish and Arab fighters besieging the town of Manbij in the province of Aleppo, a key outpost for the terror group not far from the Turkish border which had allowed it to threaten rebel groups fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
The Norwegian Refugee Council, which runs camps for displaced people near Falluja, said the sudden arrivals meant relief capabilities were rapidly being diminished. “Thousands of civilians from Falluja are right now heading towards displacement camps in a dramatic development that is overwhelming emergency aid provision and services,” it said. Earlier this year, Isis lost Ramadi, the capital of the predominantly Sunni Anbar province, though much of the city was destroyed in the campaign.
With Isis retreating, a window has opened for civilians to leave, but the journey remains dangerous, with several reported cases of people killed or wounded by roadside bombs. There were an estimated 50,000 people in the city when the operation was launched, but it is unclear how many remain.
Civilians have been used as human shields by Isis, and those who managed to flee faced the possibility of sectarian abuse by elements of the pro-government forces. Falluja is a predominantly Sunni city and the involvement of Shia militia groups in the operation had raised fears of revenge attacks.
Several men who eventually reached displacement camps outside the city after being screened by Iraqi forces spoke of torture and killing at the hands of militias. They said some paramilitary forces openly told the local men that they held of their desire to avenge the victims of the Speicher massacre, which saw Isis and allied local gunmen kill up to 1,700 mostly Shia people near Tikrit two years ago.