Iraqi forces on Friday battled terrorist of ISIS making what looked increasingly like a last stand in Tikrit.
Thousands of fighters surrounded a few hundred holdout ISIS militants, pounding their positions from the air in the city centre.
“We are surrounding the gunmen in the city centre. We’re advancing slowly due to the great number of IEDs (improvised explosive devices),” a police colonel told AFP on condition of anonymity.
“We estimate there are 10,000 IEDs in the city,” he said.
Massively outnumbered, the terrorists defence consists of a network of booby traps, roadside bombs and snipers through which suicide attackers occasionally ram car bombs into enemy targets. “Six soldiers were killed and 11 wounded in a suicide car bomb this morning in Al-Dyum neighbourhood” in western Tikrit, the colonel said. An army major confirmed the death toll.
Tikrit was the hometown of Dictator Saddam, remnants of whose Baath party collaborated with the ISIS when they took over almost a third of the country in June 2014.
Commanders see the recapture of overwhelmingly Sunni Arab Tikrit as a stepping stone for the reconquest of second city Mosul further north, which once had a population of two million.
According to local media in Salah-il-Din “IraqiNews.com” A group of tribesmen succeeded to kill a suicide bomber who was intending to detonate his explosive vest in Al-Jibara tribe in Alam district of eastern Tikrit city, the center of Salah-il-Din province.
Basheer Village of southwestern Kirkuk province has been liberated from the control of the terrorist ISIL on Friday evening, security source reported.
The Kurdish Peshmerga forces in coordination with volunteers managed to liberate the Basheer village which is dominated by residents from the Turkmen community from the control of the terrorist ISIL on Friday evening.
The allied forces raised the Iraqi flag over the buildings in the village.
On Friday morning, a military operation has started to liberate the village which was considered a threshold for the gangs of the ISIL in Kirkuk province.