Iraqi forces retook one of the militant Islamic State (IS) group's last two enclaves in the country on Thursday, overrunning the longtime insurgent bastion of Hawija after a two-week offensive.
Only a stretch of the Euphrates Valley near the border with Syria remains to be retaken from the militants who have suffered defeat after defeat in Iraq this year.
“I announce the liberation of the city of Hawija,” Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told a news conference in Paris. “All that remains is the strip on the border with Syria,” he added.
The operation's commander, Lieutenant General Abdel Amir Yarallah, had earlier announced that troops, police and paramilitaries had retaken the city centre.
Hawijah, 230 kilometres north of Baghdad, was at the centre of a pocket of mainly Sunni Arab towns that were among the final holdouts from the territory seized by the militants in 2014. The town had been an insurgent bastion since soon after the United States-led invasion of 2003, earning it the nickname of “Kandahar in Iraq” for the ferocious resistance it put up similar to that in the Taliban militia's citadel in Afghanistan.
The area's population is deeply hostile both to the government in Baghdad and to the Kurds who form the historic majority in adjacent areas. Government forces bypassed it in their advance north to second city Mosul last year, which culminated in the militants' defeat in the emblematic bastion in July.
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