BAGHDAD—Iraqi officials hailed on Wednesday the progress achieved by government troops on the second day of a military operation aimed at dislodging ISIS extremists from a key area north of the capital, Baghdad.
On Tuesday, 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 kilometers (60 miles) north of Baghdad, with the aim to cut ISIS supply lines and to tighten the grip around the ISIS-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 Defense 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.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, known as UNAMI, put the number of the killed civilians at 410, a figure which according to U.N. methodology includes the federal police, civil defense forces and personal security details. The rest were security forces, including Kurdish peshmerga and paramilitary troops.
It added that a total of 1,290 people were wounded, including 1,050 civilians. The worst affected area was Baghdad, with 277 civilians killed and 838 injured.
