BAGHDAD - Iraqi security forces have held off a militant assault on a government headquarters in troubled Anbar province, deploying reinforcements in the key battleground against the Islamic State group, officers said Thursday.
Pro-government troops, backed by tribesmen, managed to defend the complex in Ramadi, which lies 100 kilometres (60 miles) west of the capital and is one of the last major urban areas in Anbar under Baghdad’s control.
The attack by IS fighters, as well as clashes in the northern province of Kirkuk, follow gains made elsewhere by government forces battling to recapture ground from the extremists. ‘We were able to stop the militants from advancing in the government complex,’ said army Colonel Haytham al-Daraji who was involved in the defence of the area on Wednesday.
Four members of the security forces were killed and 21 wounded, according to the officer and a doctor. Daraji said that more than 10 air strikes were carried out against the militants in Al-Hoz, an area from which security forces pulled back, allowing the militants to advance to within striking distance of the key government buildings.
He said reinforcements had been deployed in the city. Parts of Ramadi and all of Fallujah, to its east, have been outside government control since the beginning of the year, but much more of Anbar province has since been seized by IS, which spearheaded a sweeping June offensive that overran swathes of Iraq.
‘If we lose Anbar, that means we will lose Iraq,’ the province’s governor, Ahmed al-Dulaimi, told Al-Anbar television from Germany, where he is recovering after being wounded by a mortar round in September.
‘I will very soon be with the tribes and the security forces in Anbar to fight’ IS, Dulaimi said.
Iraqi security forces wilted under the initial June IS onslaught, but are now backed by US-led air strikes, international advisers, Shia militiamen and tribes, and have begun to claw back some areas. They retook Jurf al-Sakhr south of Baghdad and also made important gains in the Baiji, Jalawla and Saadiyah areas north of the capital.
But three key cities - Mosul, Tikrit and Fallujah - are still in militant hands, as are a slew of villages and other areas. Security forces have repeatedly assaulted Tikrit and each time failed, while the battle for Ramadi is still being fought some 11 months after it began.
And while Kurdish forces and elite federal troops have fought IS in Nineveh province, they would have to make major advances to pose a credible threat to its capital Mosul, Iraq’s second city, which was the first to fall in June. IS forces also assaulted three villages on Wednesday in the northern province of Kirkuk, control of which is split between Kurds and militants, temporarily seizing one and setting off hours of clashes.
Six security forces members died in the fighting and 28 were wounded, officers and a doctor said. IS also holds major territory in Syria, where it is one of the most powerful forces in the country’s civil war, and has declared a cross-border Islamic ‘caliphate’ encompassing parts of both nations.
Earlier this week, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime carried out air strikes on Raqa, a provincial capital seized by IS, killing at least 95 people, over half of them civilians, a monitoring group said. On Wednesday, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the US was ‘horrified’ by reports of the deaths of dozens of civilians in Raqa.
‘The Assad regime’s continued slaughter of Syrian civilians further exposes its callous disregard for human life,’ Psaki said. Ramadi has been on the verge of falling into IS several times this year but Iraqi forces there have just done enough to prevent that.
The Soufan think-tank in its latest briefing note said the IS group needed a victory in Anbar to maintain the threat on Baghdad, discourage a mass tribal campaign that could be its undoing and boost its ranks’ morale. ‘Facing a bleak future in which its opponents get stronger while it gets weaker and further encircled, the Islamic State is pushing hard in Anbar province,’ it said. IS ‘is trying to gain more strongholds closer to Baghdad from which to launch attacks into the capital. To date it has been unsuccessful,’ the Soufan Group said.
Meanwhile, Denmark paid unemployment benefits to 28 people while they were waging war for the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria, the Danish intelligence service was quoted as saying on Thursday.
Out of the 28 Danish people identified by the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) as having received benefits, 15 had been ordered to pay the money back, eight people were still being investigated, and five cases had been dropped due to insufficient evidence, tabloid BT reported. ‘It is incredibly important that we are not naive,’ Danish Justice Minister Mette Frederiksen told the daily when asked about the data, which was found by merging records kept by different authorities.
Denmark has one of the world’s most generous unemployment insurance systems, with those on the scheme receiving up to 801 kroner per day (108 euros, $134) for up to two years. However, some of the militants were on a significantly more modest basic unemployment benefit also paid in Denmark.
Denmark has the second largest number of foreign fighters in Syria relative to its size among Western nations, after Belgium, according to some estimates. The Danish intelligence service has said ‘more than 100’ Danes have left the country for Syria’s bloody civil war, but a Danish commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, Naser Khader, said he believed the estimate - from June - was higher and needed to be revised upwards.
‘The figure is rising in many other countries, so why should that not be the case in Denmark?’ he told the Berlingske newspaper. Germany’s intelligence agency said last week it believes 550 Germans have joined extremist groups in Syria and Iraq. Authorities had previously estimated the number at 450. Britain believes around 500 of its citizens are fighting for IS.