Iraqi forces, militiamen enter IS stronghold
DAHUK, Iraq – Iraqi government troops and allied militiamen battled their way Wednesday into the city of Tikrit, threatening to deal a punishing blow to Islamic State militants in the hometown of former strongman Saddam Hussein.
Pro-government forces entered the city’s northern Qadisiya district and raised the Iraqi flag over government buildings amid cheers and rounds of celebratory gunfire, according to Al-Iraqiya, the nation’s semiofficial news service.
The governor of surrounding Salahuddin province, Raed Jabouri, predicted a “great victory” and declared that troops would soon be thrusting into the center of the strategic and heavily symbolic city.
Other pro-government news sites and officials also cited significant advances into Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. But it was not clear how far government forces had reached into the sprawling city, once home to more than 200,000 people.
“The fighting is ongoing and I think it will take some days before the picture is clear,” Hoshyar Zebari, a deputy prime minister, said in a telephone interview from Baghdad.
The Tikrit battle has been widely viewed as a test run for the more daunting government challenge of retaking Mosul, a much larger city about 140 miles up the Tigris River. Like Tikrit, Mosul’s population is largely Sunni Arab and has long been hostile to the government in Baghdad.
While most civilians are believed to have fled Tikrit, Mosul still has a significant civilian population – by some estimates as many as 800,000 people – and capturing it will probably involve complex urban warfare, experts say.
Though it has tried to cultivate an image of invincibility, the Islamic State group has suffered a number of setbacks. Kurdish militiamen, backed by U.S. air power, drove the militants from the northern Syria city of Kobani in January in a monthslong battle. Iraqi forces also routed the militants from the eastern province of Diyala, which borders Iran.
However, the Islamic State still controls significant territory in both Syria and Iraq, and also has the support of many Sunnis alienated by the central governments in Baghdad and Damascus. The Islamic State is also believed to have access to revenue from smuggling, oil sales, extortion and kidnapping rings, among other enterprises.
U.S. officials, who have backed the Baghdad government but are not directly involved in the Tikrit operation, appeared confident that loyalist forces would win back the city, a longtime hub of opposition against the U.S.-backed, Shiite-led administration in Baghdad.
In Washington, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Senate hearing that “there is no doubt” that government forces would drive the militants out of Tikrit.
As many as 30,000 Iraqi government forces and Iranian-backed Shiite militias, supported by a contingent of Sunni tribesmen, are converging on Tikrit, say Iraqi officials, who have celebrated the offensive as a source of national pride and honor.
The involvement of Shiite militiamen – who Dempsey said number about 20,000 fighters – and the reported presence of at least one major commander from Shiite Iran have raised concern about reprisal attacks by Shiites outraged by Islamic State slayings of hundreds of Shiite soldiers and police officers during the al-Qaida breakaway faction’s summer onslaught.
Tikrit is close to a former U.S. and Iraqi military base, known as Camp Speicher, where the militants massacred hundreds of Iraqi security troops, mostly Shiites. At least one major Shiite militia leader has been quoted as calling for revenge for the incident.
The Islamic State, a Sunni group that has declared a “caliphate” across a broad area of Iraq and neighboring Syria, views Shiites as apostates and has regularly killed Shiite civilians and fighters.
Prime Minister Haider Abadi, a Shiite, has repeatedly urged combatants to respect the rights of civilians.
Still, many Sunni representatives have voiced concern about reprisal attacks by Shiite fighters, who form the bulk of Iraq’s armed forces, police and pro-government militias.
Various Shiite militias, some Iranian-backed, have become key elements of Iraq’s defense apparatus. Membership boomed after the U.S.-trained Iraqi army and police units retreated ignominiously in the face of the Islamic State advance last year.
With Baghdad seemingly threatened, leading Shiite clerics called on volunteers to enlist in defense of their country, a call heeded by multitudes of all ages.
On Tuesday, the Muslim Scholars’ Commission in Iraq, a Sunni religious body, accused combatants affiliated with the League of the People of Righteousness, a prominent Shiite faction, of burning property belonging to Sunnis in the Albo Ujayl area near Tikrit. The group asserted that militiamen had uploaded videos depicting fires engulfing houses and commercial businesses as fighters cheered and sang sectarian chants.