Sanjha Morcha

Iraqi forces push into streets of Fallujah

Outskirts of Falluja, May 30 

Iraqi forces thrust into the city of Fallujah from three directions  under US air support on Monday and captured a police station inside the city limits, launching a direct assault to retake one of the main strongholds of Islamic State militants.

A Reuters TV crew about 1.5 km from the city’s edge said explosions and gunfire were ripping through Naimiya, a district of Fallujah on its southern outskirts.An elite military unit, the Rapid Response Team, seized the district’s police station at midday, state television reported.The battle for Fallujah is shaping up to be one of the biggest ever fought against Islamic State, in the city where US forces waged the heaviest battles of their 2003-2011 occupation against the Sunni Muslim militant group’s precursors.Fallujah is Islamic State’s closest bastion to Baghdad, and believed to be the base from which the group has plotted an escalating campaign of suicide bombings against Shia civilians and government targets inside the capital.As government forces pressed their onslaught, suicide bombers driving a car and a motorcycle and another bomb planted in a car killed more than 20 people and injured more than 50 in three districts of Baghdad, police and medical sources said.Separately, Kurdish security forces announced advances against Islamic State in northern Iraq, capturing villages from militants outside Mosul, the biggest city under militant control.The Iraqi army launched its operation to recover Fallujah a week ago, first by tightening a six-month-old siege around the city 50 km west of Baghdad.Fallujah, in the heartland of Sunni Muslim tribes who resent the Shia-led government in Baghdad, was the first Iraqi city to fall to Islamic State in January 2014. A Shia militia coalition known as Popular Mobilization, or Hashid Shaabi, was seeking to consolidate the siege by dislodging militants from Saqlawiya, a village just to the north of Fallujah. — Reuters

Fallujah — An Islamist militant stronghold

  • Fallujah has been a bastion of the Sunni insurgency that fought both the US occupation of Iraq and the Shia-led Baghdad govt that took over after the fall of Saddam Hussein
  • American troops suffered some of their worst losses of the war there in two battles in 2004 to wrest it back from Al-Qaida in Iraq, the insurgent group now known as Islamic State
  • Fallujah is the second-largest Iraqi city still under control of the militants, after Mosul, their de facto capital in the north that had a pre-war population of about 2 million
  • It would be the third major city in Iraq recaptured by the government after Saddam’s home town Tikrit and Ramadi, the capitalof Iraq’s vast western Anbar province

Islamic State bombings kill 24 in Baghdad

  • A wave of bombings claimed by the Islamic State group targeted commercial areas in and around Baghdad on Monday, killing at least 24 people in attacks that came as Iraqi troops poised to recapture Fallujah
  • The bombings by IS, which has been behind several recent deadly attacks in Baghdad and beyond, are seen as an attempt by the militants to divert the security forces’ attention away from the front lines
  • In an online statement, IS claimed responsibility for the attacks, saying they targeted members of the Shiamilitias and a government office