ISIL now controls ‘less than 7% of Iraq’

Just three years ago, the extremist group controlled nearly 40 per cent of territory in Iraq.

Baghdad // ISIL now controls less than seven per cent of Iraq, down from the 40 per cent it held nearly three years ago, a military spokesman said on Tuesday.

Iraqi forces backed by US-led airstrikes and other support are now battling ISIL inside the second city of Mosul, after retaking much of the other territory the extremists had seized.

“Daesh controlled 40 per cent of Iraqi land” in 2014, Brigadier General Yahya Rasool said.

“As of March 31 [this year], they only held 6.8 per cent of Iraqi territory,” said Brig Gen Rasool, spokesman of the Joint Operations Command coordinating the anti-ISIL effort.

Various members of the forces, Iraqi and foreign, battling the extremist group have disagreed in the past on figures about control of territory, but ISIL has been losing ground steadily for close to two years.

ISIL shocked the world when it took over Mosul in June 2014 and then swept across much of the country’s Sunni Arab heartland.

Its reach in Iraq peaked in August the same year when a second offensive saw it take over areas of northern Iraq that were home to various minorities and had been under the control of forces from the country’s autonomous Kurdish region’s forces.

Iraqi forces with the backing of the US-led coalition – which has thousands of military personnel deployed in Iraq and carries out daily air strikes – launched a major offensive to retake Mosul in October 2016.

They retook control of the eastern side of the city, which is divided by the Tigris River, in January and have since mid-February been battling die-hard extremists holed up in their last west Mosul redoubts.

The full recapture of Mosul, the de facto capital of the “caliphate” that ISIL proclaimed nearly three years ago, would end the extremists’ dreams of a cross-border state.

Speaking at the same press conference in Baghdad on Tuesday, the spokesman for the US-led coalition vowed that Iraq would not be abandoned after the recapture of Mosul.

“Once that task is accomplished, the coalition will be here to support our Iraqi partners as they eliminate IS from every corner of Iraq,” Colonel John Dorrian said.

“Though the fighting is going to be very hard ... this enemy is completely surrounded. They aren’t going anywhere – they will be defeated and the people of Mosul will be free,” he said.

The coalition has come under criticism following an air strike in west Mosul last month that took a heavy toll on civilians, a strike it admitted may have been its own.

* Agence France-Presse