madaresharghi [1]
Iraqi forces retook on Friday the last town in the country that was held by the Daesh terror group, more than three years after the terrorists stormed nearly a third of Iraq’s territory, the Defense Ministry said.
At dawn, military units and local tribal fighters pushed into the western neighborhoods of Rawa in western Anbar Province, and after just five hours of fighting they retook the town, according to Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool, the ministry’s spokesman, AP reported.
Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi congratulated his forces on retaking Rawa. In a statement released on Friday afternoon, Abadi said Iraqi forces liberated Rawa in record time and were continuing operations to retake control of Iraq’s western desert and the border area with Syria.
Rawa, 275 kilometers northwest of Baghdad, lies along the Euphrates river valley near the border town of Qaim that Iraqi forces retook from Daesh earlier this month.
Daesh blitzed across Iraq’s north and west in the summer of 2014, capturing Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul and advancing to the edges of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.
All that now remains of Daesh-held Iraq are patches of rural territory in the country’s vast western desert along the border with Syria.
Daesh has steadily been losing ground across the border in Syria as well where its so-called “caliphate” has basically crumbled with the loss of the city of Raqqa, the former Daesh’s de facto capital, which fell to the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces in October.
Daesh dream in tatters
The terrorists once controlled a territory the size of Britain but they have successively lost all their key strongholds, including Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.
Over the border in Syria, Daesh still holds around 25 percent of the countryside of Deir ez-Zor Province but are under attack not only by government forces but also by US-backed forces.
In the border town of Bukamal, the Syrian Army was battling Daesh terrorists who mounted a surprise counterattack last week, pushing out government forces who had retaken it last month.
With the terrorists’ dreams of statehood lying in tatters following the battlefield defeats, Western attention is increasingly pivoting to trying to block foreign terrorists from returning home to carry out attacks.
Analysts have warned that in some areas recaptured from Daesh, government control remains weak and the terrorists retain the capability to wage a low-level insurgency.