By W.G. Dunlop and Ammar Karim
Iraq has vowed to reclaim the entire country from jihadists after having liberated the city of Tikrit, its biggest boost yet in the fight against the Islamic State group.
Speaking from a newly-secured area of central Tikrit, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said the government was "determined to liberate every inch of Iraqi land".
Iraqi fighters picked their way through the rubble-strewn streets of the city, wary of any last-ditch attack from diehard IS fighters and of the thousands of bombs they left behind.
A major military push saw Iraqi police and allied forces retake the city centre on Tuesday but small pockets of jihadist militants remained.
A top leader in the Badr organisation, one of the most prominent Shi'ite militias in Iraq, admitted that Tikrit had not been completely purged of jihadist fighters.
"Snipers are still there and many buildings are booby-trapped," Karim al-Nuri told AFP in the northern Tikrit neighbourhood of Qadisiya.
A commander for the Ketaeb Imam Ali militia said his men were involved in a firefight in the north of the city in the morning.
They "tried to advance on the university", Rasul al-Abadi told AFP, adding that there were "no more than 30" IS fighters left in the city's vast Qadisiya district.
There has been concern that Iraq does not have enough specialised ordnance clearance teams to handle the quantity of traps left by IS fighters.
Ghaban said that security forces had so far found 185 rigged houses and 900 bombs planted on roads.
Iraq's top brass was training its sights on Mosul, which jihadist fighters seized from the government at the same time as Tikrit in June last year.
The loss of Tikrit further isolates Mosul, the capital of Nineveh and the main IS hub in Iraq, with Baghdad's forces now poised to push north while Kurdish forces close in from the three other directions.
The government has provided no information on how many fighters were killed, wounded or captured in the fighting but Baghdad's forces are believed to have suffered heavy casualties.
There was a lull in fighting when government forces and their allies baulked at the number of snipers, booby traps, berms and trenches which IS was using to defend its city centre redoubt.
Abadi requested air strikes and US jets began bombing IS targets in Tikrit on March 25.
The Iraqi government had tried and failed several times to retake the hometown of former president Saddam Hussein but the latest operation was larger and better organised.
AFP
source: newshub archive
