Iraqi forces launched an operation on Tuesday to retake the town of Sherqat from the ISIL Takfiri group which has controlled it for more than two years, military sources said.
The town lies on the west bank of the Tigris river 260 kilometers (160 miles) northwest of Baghdad and around 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Mosul, the jihadists’ last major bastion in Iraq.
Iraqi forces have already reconquered other towns north of Sherqat on the way to Mosul.
“The operation to liberate Sherqat started at 5:30 am (0230 GMT) from several directions… with the support of coalition forces,” Joint Operations Command spokesman Yahya Rasool said.
“We are making good progress,” he told AFP. “Sherqat is important, we can’t move on Mosul and have terrorists control Sherqat.”
Sherqat lies in the far north of Salaheddin province, which includes the cities of Samarra and Tikrit, and close to the border with Nineveh province of which Mosul is the capital.
Ahmed al-Assadi, the spokesman of the Hashed al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Forces) paramilitary force, also announced the operation.
“The sons of Hashed al-Shaabi and the Iraqi army backed by the air force launched the ‘Sherqat Dawn’ operation to finish expelling those terrorist gangsters from usurped Iraqi land,” he said.
The Hashed al-Shaabi has played a big part in retaking ISIL-held areas since 2014,and is nominally under the control of the prime minister Haider al-Abadi.
Source: AFP
