Inside Fallujah: The fight to destroy ISIL is not over

Foreign Correspondent Florian Neuhof reports from Fallujah where, since ISIL were pegged back to just a few neighbourhoods on Thursday, the Iraqi army has pounded the insurgents mercilessly.

An officer with the Iraqi police units fighting in Fallujah directs a surveillance drone back on to a roof that serves as a mortar firing position. Florian Neuhof for The National

Fallujah, Iraq // The thunder of heavy artillery accompanies columns of armoured cars that continue to pour into Fallujah a month after the battle for the ISIL stronghold near Baghdad began.

On the sandy plains, batteries of howitzers and rocket launchers face the city ominously, and spew their deadly missiles into the sky at regular intervals.

Since ISIL was pegged back to a few neighbourhoods around Fallujah’s old town on Thursday, allowing tens of thousands of civilians to flee the city, the Iraqi army has pounded the remaining insurgents mercilessly.

“The fighting got easier once the civilians fled. The operation was delayed a lot out of concern for the inhabitants,” said Bassem Moshen, a general with Iraq’s federal police who is fighting in Fallujah.

The intense barrage puts further pressure on ISIL, which are being pushed back on a daily basis by Iraq’s elite counterterrorism outfit, known as the Golden Division. The crack soldiers are aided by police units, and a rapid-reaction force under the auspices of the interior ministry.

While the Golden Division spearheads the attack, the police secures the areas that have been cleared, and its Humvees roam the deserted streets of the shot up and abandoned neighbourhoods just behind the front.

A little further ahead, long bursts of automatic fire and a steady drumroll of explosions prove that the fight for the city is far from complete.

prime minister Haider Al Abadi on Friday declared victory after Iraqi forces took the central government compound of Fallujah, and ISIL withdrew towards the Old Town.

But officers on the ground estimate that several hundred insurgents remain in the city, and they are putting up a bitter fight. Since the battle for Fallujah began, ISIL has succeeded in slowing the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) advance with a stream of suicide attacks, and soldiers are weary of explosive laden vehicles driving into their lines.

Fallujah fell to ISIL more than two years ago, and the insurgents have used their time to burrow an extensive network of tunnels underneath the city, which allows them to avoid coalition airstrikes, and attack unexpectedly. They have also littered the city with improvised explosive devices (IED), crude mines that blow vehicles from roads and turn houses into death traps.

Battered by artillery and rocket fire, and facing the prowess of the Golden Division, the remaining extremists are determined to fight to the death. The areas taken from ISIL tell of the intensity of the battle. Few houses have remained untouched by the fighting: facades are riddled with bullet holes, walls have been shattered by heavy weaponry, and entire buildings have been destroyed by air strikes. Gutted skeletons of armoured cars lie by the roadside.

Some ISIL fighters have been less committed, and tried to escape the city by blending in with fleeing civilians, but have all been caught, according to Mr Moshen.

They leave behind grim reminders of ISIL rule. In the Risala neighbourhood that was cleared of the insurgents last week, soldiers discovered a makeshift prison, used to punish inhabitants of Fallujah who fell foul of the terror group’s hardline rules. In a front room of a spacious house in a suburban area stood metal cages barely a metre wide, some so small that a captive would be forced to crouch.

In the neighbourhood of Andalus, which is wedged between Risala and the old town, police units support the Golden Division in its drive northwards. Sniper fire crackles from buildings off Baghdad Street, which runs along the old town. On a rooftop, a mortar position fires into ISIL’s shrinking territory.

Next to the mortar tubes a small group of officers sit looking at the screen of a tablet. One of them holds a remote control, directing a small drone that they launched from the roof, while his colleagues watch enemy movements relayed to the tablet by the drone’s camera. The officers have been trained by US instructors to use the drone, and it is a valuable addition to their arsenal, they say.

Down on the road, another group of fighters in rag tag uniforms mill about. They belong to the Badr Brigade, one of the Shiite militia group that has been tasked with forming a cordon around Fallujah to prevent ISIL from breaking out. The Shiite militias, also known as the Hashed Al Shaabi, have a strong sectarian bias and have been accused of torturing and killing Sunni civilians escaping Fallujah.

To limit potential human rights abuses, the city was supposed to have been off limits to the Hashed, and the Badr unit is the only one that has gone in, said its commander, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Sadiq Al Barsari.

“We consider this to be the head of the snake,” says the commander about Fallujah, a city that has been a stronghold of the Sunni insurgency since the US toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.