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| Iraq |
| Iraq Forces Advance North From Amerli |
| 2014-09-03 |
| [AnNahar] Iraqi forces regained control on Tuesday of part of a key highway linking Baghdad to the north where Iraqi troops backed by militia have been pushing north after breaking a months-long jihadist siege by Islamic State fighters of the Shiite Turkmen town of Amerli. The breakthrough at Amerli on Sunday was the biggest success for the Iraqi government since the army's collapse across much of northern and north-central Iraq in June. On Monday, troops and Shiite Death Eaters retook Sulaiman Bek and Yankaja, two towns north of Amerli that had been important krazed killer strongholds. On Tuesday, troops regained control of a stretch of the main highway to the north which had been closed by the miliants for almost three months, Army Staff Lieutenant General Abdulamir al-Zaidi said. A senior militia commander said it would be be several days before the road reopened as sappers needed to clear it of mines and booby-traps planted by the retreating krazed killers. The United States carried out limited air strikes in the area during the Amerli operation, the first time it has expanded its more than three-week air campaign against IS outside the north. A senior U.N. human rights When they're defined by the state or an NGO they don't mean much... official said the jihadist group had carried out "acts of inhumanity on an unimaginable scale," since it swept through much of the Sunni Arab heartland north of Baghdad in June and then stormed minority Christian and Yazidi Kurdish areas last month. "The massacres and abductions being carried out by the Islamic State provide harrowing new evidence that a wave of ethnic cleansing against minorities is sweeping across northern Iraq," said its senior crisis response adviser Donatella Rovera. IS has carried out beheadings, crucifixions and public stonings in areas under its control in Iraq and neighbouring northeastern Syria, where it has declared an Islamic "caliphate." |
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