BAGHDAD: Daesh now controls less than seven per cent of Iraq, down from the 40 per cent it held nearly three years ago, a military spokesman said on Tuesday.
“Daesh controlled 40 per cent of Iraqi land” in 2014, Brigadier-General Yahya Rasool told reporters.
“As of March 31 (this year), they only held 6.8 per cent of Iraqi territory,” said Rasool, the spokesman of the Joint Operations Command coordinating the anti-jihadist effort.
Various members of the forces, Iraqi and foreign, battling the jihadists have disagreed in the past on control of territory figures but Daesh has been losing ground steadily over close to two years.
The most brutal organisation in modern terrorism shocked the world when it took over Mosul, Iraq’s second city, in June 2014 and then swept across much of the country’s Sunni Arab heartland.
Its reach in Iraq peaked in August the same year when a second offensive saw it take over areas of northern Iraq that were home to various minorities and had been under the control of the autonomous Kurds.
Iraqi forces with the backing of the US-led coalition — which has thousands of forces deployed in Iraq and carries out daily air strikes — launched a major offensive to retake Mosul in October 2016.
They retook control of the eastern side of the city, which is divided by the Tigris river, in January and have since mid-February been battling diehard jihadists holed up in their last west Mosul redoubts.
Coalition to stay
The full recapture of Mosul, the de facto capital of the “caliphate” Daesh supremo Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi publicly proclaimed in the city nearly three years ago, would effectively end any Daesh claim to be running a state.
Speaking at the same press conference in Baghdad on Tuesday, the spokesman for the US-led coalition vowed that Iraq would not be abandoned after the recapture of Mosul.
“Once that task is accomplished, the coalition will be here to support our Iraqi partners as they eliminate Daesh from every corner of Iraq,” Colonel John Dorrian said.
The coalition has come under criticism following the deaths last month in west Mosul of scores of civilians in an air strike it admitted may have been its own.
“Every strike that we conduct, we conduct using precision-guided munitions. Every strike that we conduct is coordinated directly with the Iraqi security forces,” he said.
“We are very careful. We never, ever target civilians,” Dorrian said.
Daesh still controls the large towns of Hawijah and Tal Afar as well as remote areas along the border with Syria in western Iraq. It also holds the city of Raqqa and other areas in neighbouring Syria.
