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Iraqi security forces, allied with local tribesmen, battled extremist group Islamic State (IS) on Wednesday to defend the governor’s office the city of Ramadi, the capital of the Anbar province. Kurdish peshmerga forces were also engaged in battle against the IS for hours in the province of Kirkuk in northern Iraq.
“We are defending and protecting the governmental complex” in Ramadi, police Colonel Hamid Shandukh said, adding that militants were only a few hundred yards away from the governor’s office.
The fighting started when police and soldiers pulled back from Al-Hoz, an area which stretches from Ramadi’s center to its south, Shandukh said, adding that the government complex is now being defended by hundreds of tribesmen and security forces.
Colonel Salah Arrak al-Alwani also confirmed the fighting in Ramadi, saying that it had gone on for over nine hours.
“If we lose Anbar, that means we will lose Iraq”, Ahmed al-Dulaimi, the province’s governor, told told Al-Anbar television from Germany; al-Dulaimi is recovering after being hit by a mortar round earlier in September.
“I will very soon be with the tribes and the security forces in Anbar to fight (the IS)”, he added.
Parts of Ramadi and the entirety of Fallujah, which lies a little to the east, have been outside government control when the year began, but much more of the province has fallen to the IS since, prompting warnings that it will fall completely.
Security forces had wilted under the initial IS onslaught in June, but now are being backed by US-led airstrikes, international advisers, Sunni tribes and Shi’ite militiamen, slowly clawing back lost ground.
Kurdish peshmerga forces also battled the IS across a stretch of land that borders Syria and Iran, sometimes with the help of Iraqi security forces and sometimes alone. On Wednesday, they were able to hold off a large-scale attack by the IS in the oil-rich province of Kirkuk.
“They are targeting Kirkuk and they want to control the oil sites”, peshmerga Major General Westa Rasul sai
