Iraqi forces battle ISIS in Fallujah days after city’s fall

A senior Iraqi military commander says about 2,500 ISIS militants have been killed during a month-long offensive to recapture the city of Fallujah.

It said it believed dozens of families were still inside Fallujah, including the most vulnerable civilians such as pregnant women, the sick and the elderly.

With aerial support from the US-led coalition, Iraqi special forces took control of the neighbourhoods of al-Shurta and al-Jughaifi, special forces’ Brigadier General Haider al-Obeidi said.

One site hosting around 1,800 people has only one latrine, according to the NRC. “Pregnant women, children, elderly people and people with disabilities are collapsing of exhaustion with scant medical services and aid available in the camps”, Schembri said.

Aaid workers in a temporary camp outside Fallujah say they are struggling to cope with the arrivals amid an unfolding humanitarian crisis. They are now stranded out there in a sandstorm under the scorching sun, without any protection. “Their situation is a tragedy”.

“Some 600 families have arrived at refugee camps in Dibkah [in northern Iraq]”, Mohamed al-Husseini of the Iraqi Ministry of Migration and Displacement said in a statement released on Sunday. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared on Friday that the city would be liberated “very soon”.

Fallujah, located some 42 miles west of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, is one of the largest cities in the Anbar province.

“Iraqi forces are still advancing despite the strong clashes”, he said. “Our forces will liberate all the other areas”.

The operation inside the city was being conducted by the Iraqi army, regional and federal police forces as well as special anti-terrorism units.

In the Officers neighbourhood of Fallujah, IS snipers shot at an Iraqi flag pole until it broke, an AFP photographer reported.

The loss of Fallujah would continue a losing streak for Isil that already leaves the “caliphate” it proclaimed two years ago looking moribund.

Despite being under attack on several fronts in Iraq and Syria, the extremists carried out a suicide truck bomb attack near the office of a Kurdish group in northern Iraq.