Aid Group: 4000 More Flee IS-Held City of Fallujah in Iraq

“They are running with absolutely nothing”. CAMPAIGN NEAR MOSUL The Falluja campaign veers from Washington’s battle plan, which sees the main fight looming in Mosul, the biggest city in either Iraq or Syria under Islamic State control.

Captain Omar Nazar, head of the elite unit in the Iraqi Emergency Response Division, revealed Islamic State fighters have even booby-trapped homes and using civilians as human shields as they travel around.

“We already know that there are nearly no supplies of safe drinking water, we already know that there’s widespread food shortages”, Grande said.

“The camps aren’t very suitable; no infrastructure facilities are available”, he said.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi recently announced efforts to liberate Fallujah were slowed out of concern of safety for the civilians.

Mansour said people donating money are “not providing money for terrorism”, but are misled into thinking it is for humanitarian reasons.

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), which works with internally displaced Iraqis, said on June 13 that the latest numbers meant that some 27,580 civilians have fled Fallujah since the Iraqi offensive to oust IS fighters from the city began in late May.

In the north of the country, troops fought with Islamic State militants in the village of Haj Ali for the second day in a row, an Iraqi officer taking part said.

Coalition airstrikes destroyed an estimated $500 million in Islamic State cash stockpiles, reduced oil revenues by as much as 50% and forced the group out of 45% of the territory it once held in Iraq, the Pentagon said.

“We found out that ISIS militants who are from Fallujah got their families out of the town, they sent them with some other families who are not affiliated with ISIS”.

An aid group says 4,000 more people have fled the Islamic State-held city of Fallujah in Iraq after government forces retook a key road to the IS stronghold over the weekend.

The IOM reported that while civilians continued to flee Fallujah, nearly 70,000 other displaced people had returned home in May, including 33,000 returning to parts of Anbar recaptured by government forces. Iraqi government forces release some after a few hours while others are to undergo more thorough interrogation.

The United Nations recently said that it thinks 90,000 remain.

He said nonetheless that more than 2,600 new arrivals had been recorded in displacement camps Monday, mostly civilians from the outskirts of the city.

Iraqi forces have been making slow but steady progress over the past two weeks, with elite troops dodging suicide auto bombs and picking their way through thousands of explosive devices to work their way up from the south of the city.

The Fallujah operation may delay the Mosul offensive, however, because it has siphoned off forces that would have to be replenished to retake the northern Iraq city.

According to al-Saadi, it is problematic for Daesh fighters to escape Fallujah, which is nearly completely cut off from the rest of its self-imposed caliphate.

Progress in Syria is slower because the US -led coalition has had to build a ground force from a patchwork of opposition groups operating in the country.