ISIL Takfiris Face Ultimate Rout in Tikrit

Date: 13 March 2015 - 21:28

News ID: ۱۲۰۱۰

BAGHDAD (Dispatches) -- Iraqi forces Friday battled ISIL terrorists making what looked increasingly like a last stand in Tikrit, but the group responded by vowing to expand its "caliphate".
Thousands of fighters surrounded a few hundred ISIL holdouts, pounding their positions with helicopter and artillery strikes but treading carefully to avoid the thousands of bombs littering the city center.
Two days after units spearheading Baghdad's biggest anti-ISIL operation yet pushed deep into Tikrit, a police colonel claimed around 50% of the city was now back in government hands.
"We are surrounding the gunmen in the city center. We're advancing slowly due to the great number of IEDs (improvised explosive devices)," he told AFP.
"We estimate there are 10,000 IEDs in the city," he said.
Massively outnumbered, the terrorists are defending themselves with a network of booby traps, roadside bombs and snipers, with suicide attackers occasionally ramming car bombs into enemy targets.
"Six soldiers were killed and 11 wounded in a suicide car bomb this morning in Al-Dyum neighborhood," the colonel said. An army major confirmed the death toll.
Tikrit was the hometown of dictator Saddam Hussein, remnants of whose Ba’ath party collaborated with the ISIL terrorists when they took over almost a third of the country last June.
With crucial military backing from neighboring Iran, Baghdad has rolled back some of the losses.
It started by securing the Shia holy cities of Karbala and Najaf and bolstering Baghdad's defenses, then worked its way north, retaking Diyala province earlier this year.
Commanders see the recapture of Tikrit as a stepping stone for the re-conquest of second city Mosul further north, which once had a population of two million.
ISIL has countered every military loss lately by ramping up its propaganda war with ever more shocking acts, such as a boy apparently executing a prisoner on camera, and destroying prices archaeological heritage sites.
On Thursday, the group released a recording said to be a speech by spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani accepting a pledge of allegiance by Nigeria's Boko Haram terrorist group.
"We announce to you the good news of the expansion of the caliphate to West Africa," he said.
Expansion is a pillar of ISIL doctrine, and the Takfiri group has recently declared new "provinces" in the Middle East and North Africa, albeit sometimes in places where it has a limited footprint.
Adnani shrugged off recent losses in Iraq and Syria, vowing to enter Rome, blow up the White House, Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower.
Some analysts have argued that months of battlefield setbacks and airstrikes were taking a toll on the group and that some of its latest moves concealed growing desperation.
Adnani lashed out General Qassem Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s external operations, calling him the leader of the battle.
Gen. Soleimani has been ubiquitous on Iraq's frontlines, and his myth is growing among Iraqi fighters.
He appeared in a rare mobile phone video released Thursday, giving advice in Arabic, apparently to the sons of a prominent Iraqi militia leader on how to behave themselves.
Suleimani has been seen with Iraq's top commanders since the start of the Tikrit operation and is thought to be playing a key coordinating role.
"That Suleimani has become acceptable can only be explained by the collapse of the Iraqi army last summer," said Kirk Sowell, the publisher of the Inside Iraqi Politics newsletter.
The way the army disintegrated when ISIL swept in nine months ago has led many Iraqis to give more trust and credit to the paramilitary Shia groups supported by Iran.
"When people feel endangered, they always reach for a savior," Sowell said.
Iraq's top Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who already called last year for volunteers to fight ISIL, said Friday that Baghdad must increase its support to fighters battling the Takfiri terrorists.
"It is imperative for the state to increase the attention and care for all the brother fighters and do its utmost to increase their performance and preserve gains," Ayatollah Sistani said in remarks read out by his representative.