Fallujah, Iraq: The Iraqi army advanced to the southern edge of Falluja under US air support on Monday, launching a direct assault to retake the city from Daesh terrorists and help protect the nearby capital Baghdad from suicide bombings.
As government forces pressed their onslaught, a car bomb as well as suicide bombers driving a car and a motorcycle killed more than 20 people and injured over 50 in three districts of Baghdad, police and medical sources said.
Bolstered by Iranian-backed militia, the Iraqi army launched its operation to recover Fallujah a week ago, first by tightening a six-month-old siege around the city 50km west of Baghdad.
Fallujah in January 2014 became the first Iraqi city to fall to Daesh, and it subsequently overran wide areas of the north and west of Iraq, declaring a caliphate that included seized territory in neighbouring Syria.
On Monday, army units advanced to the southern entrance to Fallujah, “steadily advancing” under air cover from the US-led coalition, according to a military statement read out on state TV. A Reuters TV crew on the scene said explosions and gunfire were ripping through Fallujah’s southern Naimiya district.
An Iranian-backed militia coalition known as Popular Mobilisation was seeking to consolidate the siege by dislodging militants from Saqlawiya, a village just to the north of Fallujah.
The militias have pledged not to take part in the assault on the main city itself to avoid aggravating sectarian strife.
Fallujah is a bastion of the insurgency that fought the US occupation of Iraq and the Baghdad government that took over after the fall of Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussain in 2003.
The offensive is causing alarm among international aid organisations over the humanitarian situation in the city, where more than 50,000 civilians remain trapped with limited access to water, food and health care.
Fallujah is the second largest Iraqi city still under control of the terrorists, after Mosul, their de facto capital in the far north that had a pre-war population of about 2 million.
Kurdish Peshmerga forces on Sunday launched an attack to oust Daesh from a handful of villages about 20km east of Mosul so as to increase the pressure on the terrorist group and pave the way for storming the city.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi hopes to recapture Mosul later this year to deal a decisive defeat to Daesh.
Al Abadi announced the onslaught on Fallujah on May 22 after a spate of bombings that killed more than 150 people in one week in Baghdad, the worst death toll so far this year.
