BAGHDAD // Iraqi forces drove ISIL militants out of the strategic oil refinery town of Beiji on Friday, handing a major defeat to the extremist group.
Government forces backed by militiamen captured the town and lifted a months-long siege on the refinery itself, Iraq’s largest, Iraqi security officials said .
The army used loudspeakers to warn the small number of residents still in the town to stay indoors while bomb squads cleared booby-trapped houses and detonated roadside bombs.
Fierce battles were fought around the refinery early on Friday and government warplanes strafed ISIL positions near the facility.
State-run television reported the “liberation” of Beiji, quoting the top army commander there, Gen Abdul-Wahab Al Saadi.
State television this week showed large-scale destruction in Beiji’s city centre, with many buildings badly damaged or completely destroyed. One clip showed Gen Al Saadi, surrounded by soldiers, walking to the headquarters of the local government in the town centre.
Beiji will now likely be a base for staging a push to take Tikrit to the south, hometown of the former dictator Saddam Hussein’s. Government forces tried to retake Tikrit earlier this year, but their campaign stalled.
Extremist militants led by ISIL captured Beiji during a summer offensive in which they swept across much of northern Iraq, starting with its second largest city Mosul. Iraqi forces collapsed in the face of the onslaught but have since partially regrouped and gone on the offensive, with Beiji the biggest town recaptured so far.
The military has also been aided by US-led airstrikes, which are targeting ISIL positions in Iraq and in neighbouring Syria.
The loss of Beiji is the latest in a series of setbacks for ISIL, which has lost hundreds of fighters to airstrikes in a stalled advance on the Syrian town of Kobani and whose leader was reportedly wounded in an airstrike earlier this month.
In Geneva, a United Nations panel investigating war crimes in Syria said Syrians and Iraqis are subjected to an ISIL “rule of terror”, with the calculated use of public brutality and indoctrination to ensure the submission of communities under its control.
The conclusions from the four-member panel of independent experts are based on more than 300 interviews with people who fled or are living in ISIL-controlled areas and on video and photographic evidence.
“Those that fled consistently described being subjected to acts that terrorise and aim to silence the population,” said Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, a Brazilian diplomat and scholar who chairs the panel.
He said whatever “services” the group provides to civilians is “always in the framework of this rule of terror”, similar to criminal organisations that use such means to control populations.
Commission member Vitit Muntarbhorn told reporters in Geneva the report was meant to amplify the voices of victims, who describe executions, amputations, public lashings and the use of sexual slavery, child soldiers and widespread indoctrination.
The group has “become synonymous with extreme violence directed against civilians and captured fighters”, the report said.
Humanitarian groups have been unable to reach almost 600,000 people living in the ISIL-controlled Syrian provinces of Deir Ezzor and Raqqa, it says, and the group has obstructed the flow of medicine, doctors and nurses into Hassakeh province.
“The group deploys its fighters and materiel in close proximity to civilian areas,” the report concludes.
The 47-nation Human Rights Council in Geneva authorized the commission to investigate all alleged violations of international human rights law since March 2011 in Syria and to identify whenever possible those responsible, so that they can be prosecuted.
ISIL presents itself as a new Muslim caliphate and has imposed a harsh version of Shariah law in the areas under its control.
The group’s quest for hegemony has long put it at odds with Syrian rebels trying to depose president Bashar Al Assad and even other Islamist extremist groups, including the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al Nusra.
US aircraft struck Al Qaeda militants in Syria on Thursday for a third time since the air campaign began in September.
American defence officials said the strike targeted the Khorasan group, which the US says is a special cell within Jabhat Al Nusra which is plotting attacks against western interests.
* Associated Press
