Iraqi officials hailed today the progress achieved by government troops on the second day of a military operation aimed at dislodging Islamic State militants from a key area north of the capital, Baghdad.
Yesterday, Iraqi troops, backed by aerial support and paramilitary forces, launched a new push to retake a sprawling desert area outside the central city of Samarra, 95 kilometres north of Baghdad, with the aim to cut IS supply lines and to tighten the grip around the IS-held northern city of Mosul.
"We have achieved a big success," the commander of the Iraqi Air Force, Staff General Hamid al-Maliki, said in a video distributed by the Defence Ministry adding that government forces had progressed farther than expected so far.
He hailed the paramilitary forces, which are mainly composed of Shiite militiamen, as playing "a big role" alongside government security forces.
The spokesman of Iraq's counter-terrorism forces, Sabah al-Numan, told The Associated Press that the militants dispatched seven suicide car bombers, but they were destroyed by security forces before reaching their targets. Al-Numan added that two militant operations centers were bombed and a train station was recaptured.
Meanwhile, the United Nations said that continuous violence has left at least 670 Iraqis dead in February, of whom about two-thirds were civilians.
"This conflict continues to exact a heavy toll on the population," the UN Special Representative for Iraq, Jan Kubis, said in the statement. "This is deeply worrying and disheartening. Civilians should not pay the price in this conflict," Kubis added.
