Forces recapture Rawa, last town held by IS in Iraq

Baghdad, November 17

The Iraqi army retook the last town in the country still held by the Islamic State group today as the jihadists’ self-proclaimed “caliphate” faced collapse on both sides of the border with Syria.

The lightning recapture of the small Euphrates valley town of Rawa in an offensive launched at dawn came as the jihadists were also under attack for a second day in the last town they still hold in Syria, Albu Kamal just over the border.

The Islamic State group (IS) has lost 95% of the cross-border “caliphate” it declared in Iraq and Syria in 2014, the US-led coalition fighting it said on Wednesday. Its losses include all of its major bastions, virtually confining it to pockets of countryside.

Government troops and paramilitary units “liberated the whole of Rawa and raised the Iraqi flag on all of its official buildings,” General Abdelamir Yarallah of Iraq’s Joint Operations Command (JOC) said in a statement.

The JOC said appeals had been made for several days to the town’s Sunni Arab residents to listen to radio broadcasts for instructions on what to do when the army entered.

Rawa was bypassed in an offensive by the Iraqi army that resulted in the recapture of the strategically important border town of Al-Qaim earlier this month.

The stretch of Euphrates valley abutting the border with Syria has long been a bastion of Sunni Arab insurgency, first against US-led troops after the invasion of 2003 and then against the Shia-led government in Baghdad.

The porous frontier became a magnet for foreign fighters entering Iraq from Syria, which Baghdad accused of turning a blind eye, and a key smuggling route for arms and illicit goods.

US-led troops carried out repeated operations with code names like Matador and Steel Curtain in 2005 to flush out Al-Qaida jihadists.

The region swiftly fell to IS when its fighters swept through the Sunni Arab heartland north and west of Baghdad in 2014 before proclaiming its “caliphate”. — AFP

Shrinking caliphate

• Driven this year from its two de facto capitals-Iraq’s Mosul and Syria’s Raqqa-Islamic State was progressively squeezed into an ever-shrinking pocket of desert, straddling the frontier between the two countries
• The IS has lost 95 per cent of the cross-border “caliphate” it declared in Iraq and Syria in 2014. The jihadists once controlled a territory the size of Britain but they have successively lost all their key strongholds