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BAGHDAD
— The Iraqi Army on Saturday drove Islamic extremists from the center
of a major city in central Iraq, for the first time mounting a concerted
assault against insurgents who had charged to within 50 miles of
Baghdad.
Independent
sources, including local officials and witnesses, confirmed that an
Iraqi Army counteroffensive had driven militants of the Islamic State in
Iraq and Syria from the center of Tikrit, including from government
buildings as well as from major roads and other positions throughout the
city.
But fighting was still continuing, with Iraqi war planes bombing targets inside the city late in the afternoon.
Tikrit,
the birthplace of Saddam Hussein, with a largely Sunni population of
250,000, is in the Tigris River Valley, 100 miles north of Baghdad. It
has long been a stronghold of antigovernment Sunnis in Iraq, and losing
it would sever the insurgents’ lines of communication to Mosul and
Syria. It could also strand some of their fighters in pockets south of
Tikrit.
Photo
Gen. Qassim Atta, the Iraq Army spokesman, spoke of gains against the rebels.Credit
Ahmad Al-Rubaye/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Some
Iraqi military analysts said they thought it was no coincidence that
army’s counteroffensive was launched now, with 180 of the 300 American
advisers ordered to Iraq by President Obama arriving over the past three
days, but Iraqi officials denied that there was any American role.
If
the advances by the Iraqi Army are sustained, and even built upon, it
would provide a much needed morale boost for an army that lost as much
as a fourth of its soldiers and equipment when ISIS overran Mosul, and has lurched from one embarrassment to another since then. It has given up the oil-rich city of Kirkuk to Kurdish forces. And it has lost all of its border crossing points
with Syria and Jordan to the militants, ceding to them control of most
of four major provinces spanning more than 200 miles from north to
south.
A
spokesman for the Iraqi military, Gen. Qassim Atta, claimed that ISIS
militants were withdrawing and that they had buried their dead on the
grounds of a former Hussein palace in Tikrit. “Reports and surveillance
show that ISIS leaders have ordered a retreat,” he said.
General Atta also said the government forces had killed Abu Abdul Hadi Baqiya, the ISIS commander for northern Tikrit.
Reports from medical officials at the provincial hospital in Tikrit said that ISIS began evacuating its wounded from the site on Friday.
ISIS,
however, claimed a victory over government forces at the southern gates
of the city, in postings on Twitter accounts associated with the
extremists.
In
other clashes, like the battle for control of the important Baiji
refinery in Salahuddin Province, both sides have sometimes traded
control of contested territory on an almost daily basis.
“The
signs of success are clear, and there is a very big change in the
performance of the security forces, and now we can say the initiative is
in the hands of the Iraqi forces,” said Ahmed al-Sheraifi, a former air
force pilot and now a professor at Baghdad University.
Mr. Sheraifi attributed the improved performance to intelligence support contributed by American drones, which have begun flying over Iraq,
as well as to American advice on tactics. “The security forces began
relying on their airborne division, and this is a trademark of U.S.
tactics,” he said.
The
Iraqi Army’s counteroffensive began Thursday with an airborne assault
on the campus of Salahuddin University, which drove the militants out of
that site. Early Saturday morning, after two days of fighting around
the university, in downtown Tikrit, the Iraqi Army launched a
three-pronged attack, with a large body of ground troops driving into
the city from the south and east, joined by troops garrisoned in Camp
Speicher, north of the city, an Iraqi Air Force training base that never
fell to the insurgents.
Having occupied crucial sections of
Syria over the past year and more recently seizing vast areas of Iraq,
the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria controls territory greater than many
countries and now rivals Al Qaeda as the world’s most powerful jihadist
group. The group seized Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, on June 10.Related Maps and Multimedia »
ISIS control of cities
Partial or complete
Contested
Attacks since Mosul
It
appeared that the offensive in Tikrit was costly to both sides, with
ISIS planting bombs along the highways leading to the city, and sending
suicide bombers against Iraqi armored vehicles. The militants, in their
Twitter posts, admitted to losing 30 fighters, but also claimed to have
destroyed eight Iraqi tanks with suicide attacks. General Atta claimed
that Iraqi forces had killed 29 of the extremists in Tikrit.
There
were also numerous reports of violence elsewhere in the country on
Saturday, with unidentified aircraft bombing militant positions in
Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, while the Sunni militants blew up two
Shiite mosques in Mosul and shelled a Shiite neighborhood on the
outskirts of Baghdad, Sabaa al-Bour, killing four civilians, according
to the police and medical officials.
In
western Anbar Province, nine members of an Iraqi police SWAT team were
killed when a roadside bomb blew up their convoy near Ramadi, security
officials there said. And nine civilians were killed when ISIS shelled
the center of Ramadi, according to hospital officials and witnesses.
In
a news conference on Saturday, General Atta confirmed that American
advisers had arrived in the country and were in touch with their Iraqi
counterparts, but he said they had no active role in current military
operations.
“Until
now the Iraqi forces are carrying out the plan, there is full control
of the ground operations,” he said. “We are still coordinating with the
American side in relation to the study of important targets. Soon it
will be clear what they are going to be doing.”
Aside
from its importance as a stronghold for hard-line Sunnis, Tikrit has a
more immediate resonance with Iraqis. Early in its advance toward
Baghdad, ISIS boasted that it had killed 1,700 Iraqi soldiers, many of them air force recruits who tried to flee from Camp Speicher, while other Iraqi soldiers stayed there to defend it.
The
group posted numerous photographs said to show mass killings of the
prisoners there, and Human Rights Watch described the events as clear
evidence of war crimes committed by the insurgents.
There
were numerous reports of fighting on Saturday throughout the area where
ISIS has been active, including Anbar, Diyala, Salahuddin and Nineveh
Provinces, and also on the outskirts of Kirkuk, in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Witnesses
reported seeing aircraft bombing four locations around insurgent-held
areas of Mosul, although there was no confirmation of their the
aircrafts’ origin. Iraqi officials said their aircraft had flown 96
sorties against the militants in the past day, but did not mention
Mosul.
“The
Iraqi security forces really need to gain a clear and big victory in
order to boost morale and restore confidence in their combat abilities,”
said Amad Below, a retired Iraqi general and military analyst. He, too,
said it was clear that intelligence information had started to flow to
Iraqi officials, which, he said, “has been reflected in the troops’
performance in the last two days.”
Ahmed
Saadi, a university student from Salahuddin Province, fled the fighting
because his wife is pregnant and came to Baghdad; now he plans to
return home on Sunday. “When I follow the news on TV and my friends call
me from Salahuddin, I feel that our forces are on the right track, now
we believe in them and they can protect us,” he said.
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