ISIS attacks Iraqi army base near Ramadi

The IS had taken Ramadi in May, and its liberation by Iraqi forces is seen as a big boost to the government.

Federal forces declared victory Sunday in the battle for Ramadi, which was months in the making, but the Anbar provincial capital has not been fully secured yet.

They said living conditions deteriorated to their worst since the Islamists overran it in May.

Hamid al-Dulaimi, a Ramadi district mayor, said Iraqi forces had retaken control of the city’s agricultural college and soldiers are “clearing several other neighborhoods”.

Iraq’s elite counter-terrorism service (CTS) was leading the clearing operations, supported by the army, police and the local tribal forces.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s government and the U.S.-led coalition backing it have been cagey so far in plans for Falluja, which lies between Baghdad and Ramadi, the capital of western Anbar province that the Iraqi military recaptured this week from the militants.

“What we’ve been doing for a full year is methodically, patiently, rebuilding that army and reequipping it to focus on the threat it now faces:… being able to put a bridge across a river…to get through a minefield…to integrate air power with land operations”, Warren said.

He said their task was complicated by the high number of roadside bombs and the fact that IS was firing on civilians trying to escape.

The Iraqi military claims they are being used as human shields.

A police lieutenant colonel said another 90 people, including 73 women and children, were evacuated Friday from the Thayla neighborhood.

Weeks of fighting have forced thousands to flee and have inflicted heavy losses.

Skeptics note that the United States spent tens of billions of dollars rebuilding, training and equipping Iraqi security forces whose dismantlement it ordered following the 2003 invasion, to apparently little long-term effect. “The army that we built back in the mid-2000s and left behind was a counter-insurgency army”, he said.

As the army made inroads into Ramadi ISIL forced as many as 1,000 families into the east of the city killing or threatening to kill those that refused to move.

Efforts to expel ISIS are expected to take weeks, especially in light of the jihadists’ tactics of hiding among local populations and booby-trapping territory they abandon.