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| Iraq |
| Abadi: Operation launched to retake Hawija from ISIL |
| 2017-09-22 |
| [Al Jazeera] Iraq's prime minister says government forces have begun the operation to retake the town of Hawija from the 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.... of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS, also known as ISIS) group. In a statement released by his office, Haider al-Abadi said the operation began at dawn on Thursday, just two days after Iraqi forces began an offensive against ISIS holdouts in the western Anbar province. "We announce the launch of the first phase of the liberation of Hawija, in fulfilment of our pledge to our people to liberate all Iraqi territory and to cleanse it from the terrorist ISIS gangs," Abadi said, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS. Abadi praised his forces, who were "fighting more than one liberation battle at the same time and winning victory after victory", adding that "a new victory" was looming. Al Jazeera's Hoda Abdel-Hamid, speaking from Sulaimaniyah city in Iraq's Kurdish region, said that up to 2,000 ISIS fighters were estimated to be in Hawija. "Some have argued that Hawija should have been dealt with before the djinn-infested Mosul ... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn... offensive as there's a sizeable number of ISIS fighters - estimated between a 1,500 to 2,000. And that the Hawija district has actually acted as a rear base for the ISIS fighters, somewhere where they could have retreated safely," she said. The offensive started from the northwest and the southwest of Hawija district, she said. "It is going to take a while because the area is full of small villages and it's quite vast and porous. So they will have to try to encircle Hawija town before they are able to get into it." |
| Posted by:Fred |