Iraqi troops clear bombs in Ramadi after driving out IS

The recapture of Ramadi, the Anbar provincial capital and its most populous city, would be the most significant in a series of recent successes by the Iraqi forces, which collapsed in the face of rapid Islamic State advances in mid-2014.

As Gen. Colin Powell once said of Iraq, “You break it, you bought it”.

But during the live coverage, explosions and gunfire could be still be heard in the background.

“What we hear from new arrivals is that indeed it has been hard for them to get out”.

That view was shared by Abi Ali, who saw Baghdadi’s threatening of Jews and Israel as a “great indicator of the trouble Islamic State is in”. “Warplanes do not strike any target in central Ramadi unless they are sure there are no civilians nearby”, said the officer. Bloody people came upon us, people in that don’t know the meaning of humanity.

Abadi has pledged to retake Mosul, 400 km (250 miles) north of Baghdad, next year and said this would deal a final blow to Islamic State.

Security officials said the forces still need to clear some pockets of insurgents in the city and its outskirts.

Ramadi has been battered by IS explosives and U.S.-led air strikes targeting Islamic State militants since IS fighters overran the city in May.

Troops from Iraq’s 76th Brigade had helped ring Ramadi, clearing hidden bombs and pinned down Islamic State fighters using mortar fire, he said.

Fallujah was the first Iraqi city to fall to Daesh in January 2014, six months before the group that emerged from Al Qaeda swept through large parts of Iraq and neighbouring Syria.

Further south, on the road leading to the Shi’ite shrine city of Karbala, Iran-backed Shi’ite militiamen are holding ground, Iraqi officials have said.

Such a strategy would echo the US military’s “surge” campaign of 2006-2007, which relied on recruiting and arming Sunni tribal fighters against a precursor of Islamic State. “If we can prove that a civilian had a brother fighting with Daesh and he helped him with information or something similar, then we keep him with us” before turning them over to the judiciary on terrorism charges, he said.

“It’s a lot easier to conquer than it is to hold on to this territory”.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi on Wednesday ordered the immediate removal of explosives and the restoration of basic services to allow the safe return of civilians to their homes. Washington had hoped that a potentially decisive battle for that city would take place in 2015 but it was pushed back after the fighters seized Ramadi in May.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has said the conditions are not ripe yet for tens of thousands of displaced Ramadi residents to return.