Victory close as Iraqi forces pound besieged Tikrit jihadists

Iraqi forces battled Islamic State jihadists making what looked increasingly like a last stand in Tikrit, but the group responded by vowing to expand its “caliphate”. Thousands of fighters surrounded a few hundred IS holdouts, pounding their positions with helicopter and artillery strikes but treading carefully to avoid the thousands of bombs littering the city centre. Two days after units spearheading Baghdad’s biggest anti-IS operation yet pushed deep into Tikrit, a police colonel claimed around 50 percent of the city was now back in government hands.

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

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. With crucial military backing from neighbouring Iran and a 60-nation US-led coalition, Baghdad has rolled back some of the losses. Commanders see the recapture of overwhelmingly Sunni Arab Tikrit as a stepping stone for the reconquest of Mosul further north, which once had a population of two million. But progress is slow and foreign training needed before Iraqi forces can take on Iraq’s second city.

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