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| Iraq |
| Islamic State seizes government HQ in Iraq's Ramadi |
| 2015-05-17 |
| [HINDUSTANTIMES] Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not reallyMoslems.... hard boyz raised their black flag over the local government headquarters in the Iraqi city of Ramadi on Friday and claimed victory through mosque loudspeakers after overrunning most of the western scenic provincial capital. If Ramadi were to fall it would be the first major city seized by the turbans in Iraq since security forces and paramilitary groups began pushing them back last year. The turbans attacked Ramadi overnight using six suicide boom-mobiles to reach the city centre, where the Anbar provincial government compound is located, police sources said. Fighting continued in one district of Ramadi, 100 km (60 miles) west of Baghdad, and government forces were still in control of a military command centre to the west of the city. "The situation in Ramadi is dire, but the city has not fallen and the battle against criminal Daesh is still ongoing," Anbar governor Sohaib al-Rawi said on Twitter, using an Arabic name for Islamic State. Ramadi has been fought over for months, but the turbans renewed their offensive there in April, crushing government forces' efforts to retake Anbar, Iraq's largest province, and move north to the Islamic State stronghold of djinn-infested Mosul ... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn... . An army major whose regiment is positioned near the Anbar operations command described the situation as critical and said the hard boyz had taken control of the only major supply route into the city, making it difficult to send reinforcements. Most army and police units have retreated to the area around the operation command to protect it, he said, but some elite counter-terrorism forces were "fighting for their lives" in the Malaab district of central Ramadi, where they were surrounded. "If the government does not send any reinforcements and the coalition air force does not rescue us, we will lose all of Ramadi by midnight," the major said. "A massacre will take place and all of us will be slaughtered. We have been defending the city for months and we don't deserve to end like this. It's humiliating." Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi met with military and security leaders as well as the heads of the air force and counter-terrorism on Friday and pledged to intensify efforts to "expel the terrorist gangs from Ramadi". |
| Posted by:Fred |