Closing in on victory: Iraqi forces ‘will liberate Tikrit within 72 hours’

Iraqi commanders were plotting a strategy for flushing out the few remaining Islamic State group jihadists from central Tikrit, a city one commander said Saturday would be liberated within three days. The massively outnumbered IS fighters are completely boxed in but are protected by snipers and thousands of bombs they planted across the city. That has slowed the progress of the broad alliance of forces battling IS, which is keen to minimise casualties on the way to what would be the biggest victory yet against the jihadists.

We are surrounding the gunmen in the city centre. We’re advancing slowly due to the great number of IEDs (improvised explosive devices).

An Iraqi police colonel

Karim al-Nuri, a top leader of the Badr militia and spokesman of the volunteer Popular Mobilisation units, said it would take no more than “72 hours” to liberate Tikrit from IS, which seized it last summer. The last defenders are holed up in the city centre and “surrounded from all sides”, Nuri said. Speaking to AFP from the outskirts of Tikrit, near the village of Awja, he said “their number is now 60 to 70”. Massively outnumbered, the jihadists are defending themselves with a network of booby traps, roadside bombs and snipers, with suicide attackers occasionally ramming car bombs into enemy targets. Tikrit was the hometown of dictator Saddam Hussein, remnants of whose Baath party collaborated with the jihadists when they took over almost a third of the country last June.

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