Seven civilians killed in Iraq auto bomb blasts

Iraqi forces erected a temporary bridge over a canal that separated their soldiers from downtown Ramadi, about 80 miles west of Baghdad, and used it to launch a morning offensive, military leaders said.

Dozens of militants had been killed, said Brigadier Gen. Yahya Rasool, spokesman of the joint operations command, declining to give a casualty toll for the armed forces.

A USA military spokesman, Army Colonel Steve Warren, said those strikes continue to show IS fighters they have nowhere to hide. The first vehicle was parked inside a bus station and that explosion killed three and wounded 10, a police officer told The Associated Press.

In and around Baghdad, five bombs went off in commercial areas, killing eight civilians and leaving 35 people injured.

Iraqi forces have not yet broken through the front line of ISIL’s defenses.

He said one of the documents appeared to be an order directing Daesh fighters to “impersonate Iraqi security forces” and “to commit atrocities against the civilian population before they withdraw”.

He added that the liberation of Ramadi is closer than ever, because “our forces have foiled ISIS plots, despite the numerous suicide bombers and booby traps laid before us”.

Even CNN could not confirm the Iraqi troops’ activities in Ramadi because of the difficulty in entering the area.

Belawi said the evacuated civilians would be taken to a camp near Habbaniya army base, where they would undergo security checks to ascertain whether any Islamic State loyalists were among them.

The presence of Iraqi forces around Ramadi is “like a boa constrictor, a squeezing of ISIL out of that city”, Warren said, using another name for ISIS.

The ultimate aim is to clear Islamic State from Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, and Falluja, which lies between Ramadi and Baghdad, as well as large areas of Syria – the core of what it has declared to be a caliphate.

Defence minister Khaled al-Obeidi said last week that successive operations by government for and their allies had shrunk IS territory in Iraq from roughly 40 percent of the country past year to 17 percent.

“This has been a grinding battle of attrition”. Mahlawi said he expected victory within 48 hours. The Shia-dominated Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary forces were heavily involved in the battles that led to the recapture of towns such as Tikrit and Baiji but they have remained on the fringes in the battle for Ramadi.

But Baghdad largely stuck to its strategy, resorting to newly trained local forces from Anbar to move in and hold the ground reconquered by federal forces.

“That training is starting to take hold”, he said.

IS has lost control of several key towns in Iraq to government and Kurdish forces since over-running large swathes of the country’s west and north in June 2014.

A counterattack by government forces on the centre of the Ramadi began in earnest on Tuesday.