Baghdad // Iraqi troops entered Fallujah from three directions on Monday, marking a new and perilous phase in the week-old operation to retake the city from ISIL.
The advance came as a wave of bombings claimed by the extremist group killed at least 24 people in Baghdad and near the Iraqi capital.
“Iraqi forces entered Fallujah under air cover from the international coalition, the Iraqi air force and army aviation, and supported by artillery and tanks,” said Lt Gen Abdelwahab Al Saadi, the commander of the operation.
The pre-dawn push into Fallujah was led by the elite counter-terrorism service (CTS), Iraq’s best trained and most seasoned fighting unit.
CTS Brig Haider Al Obeidi said they started pushing into Fallujah from its southern edge. He described the clashes as fierce, with ISIL deploying snipers and releasing a volley of mortar rounds.
The extremists are believed to have about 1,000 fighters in the city.
Iraqi forces have not yet ventured into the city centre but they recaptured some areas in a southern suburb after crossing a bridge, and took up positions on the eastern and northern fringes, commanders said.
Operations in the past week have focused on retaking rural areas around Fallujah, which lies just 50 kilometres west of Baghdad.
These have been led by the paramilitary force known as Hashed Al Shabi, which is dominated by Tehran-backed Shiite militias. On Monday, they were attempting to clear an area north-west of Fallujah called Saqlawiya, officers said.
The battle for the city captured by ISIL in 2014 is likely to be a protracted one, with Iraqi forces advancing slowly to minimise civilian casualties. An estimated 50,000 civilians are trapped in the city, sparking fears that ISIL could try to use them as human shields.
The few hundred families who have been able to flee so far lived in outlying areas, with the biggest wave of displaced reaching camps on Saturday night.
“We expect bigger waves of displacement the fiercer the fighting gets,” said Nasr Muflahi of the Norwegian Refugee Council.
In Amriyat Al Fallujah, a government-controlled town to the south of the city, civilians trickled in, starving and exhausted after walking through the countryside for hours at night, dodging ISIL surveillance.
“I just decided to risk everything. I was either going to save my children or die with my children,” said Ahmad Sabih, 40, who reached the NRC-run camp early on Sunday.
A senior police commander said his forces had assisted 800 civilians fleeing areas north of Fallujah on Monday.
Fallujah is one of just two major urban centres in Iraq still held by ISIL. They also hold Mosul, the country’s second city and ISIL’s de facto capital in Iraq, east of which Kurdish-led forces launched a fresh offensive on Sunday.
The extremist group has appeared to be weakened in recent months and has been losing territory consistently in the past year. According to the government, ISIL now controls around 14 per cent of Iraqi territory, down from 40 per cent in 2014.
However, as the “caliphate” it declared in Iraq and Syria two years ago unravels, ISIL has been reverting to its old tactics of bombings against civilians and commando raids.
The deadliest bombing on Monday was in the Shiite-dominated Shaab neighbourhood of Baghdad where a suicide bomber rammed his explosives-laden car into a checkpoint next to a commercial area, killing eight civilians and three soldiers. Seven civilians and three policemen died when a suicide car bomber struck an outdoor market in Tarmiyah, a town about 50km north of Baghdad, while a motorcycle bomb at a market in Baghdad’s Shiite Sadr City district killed three people.
In Syria, clashes raged around the northern town of Marea as ISIL pressed an assault on moderate rebels. The ISIL onslaught has threatened tens of thousands of people, many of them already displaced from other areas, who have sought refuge in camps near the Turkish border.
Gerry Simpson, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, said 165,000 civilians were now stuck between ISIL fighters, Kurdish forces and the border.
“What more does the US, EU and UN need to call on Turkey to give these people refuge,” he asked.
In Aleppo city, 15 people including two children were killed in the rebel-controlled eastern neighbourhoods in heavy bombardment on Monday morning, the civil defence said.
* Agence France-Presse and Associated Press
