(MENAFN- Arab Times) Government forces and Shiite militiamen repelled two Islamic State group attacks in Anbar province on Saturday, officials said. In one attack, they used anti-tank missiles to stop four would-be suicide car bombers. Police and military officials said IS fighters attacked the government-held town of Husseiba with heavy mortar fire early Saturday.
They say the attackers retreated after an hours-long battle, leaving behind three destroyed vehicles and five dead fighters. At least 10 troops and militiamen were wounded in the clash. Iraqi forces took Husseiba, near the militantheld provincial capital of Ramadi, from the IS group last month.
The officials said that elsewhere in Anbar province, Iraqi troops using Russian anti-tank Kornet missiles destroyed four incoming suicide car bombs during an IS attack in the Tharthar area. Iraqi forces, backed by Shiite militias, have been struggling to recapture areas lost to the IS group in the country's west and north.
Last month the militant group scored a stunning victory, overrunning Ramadi and capturing large amounts of ammunition and armored vehicles from fleeing government troops. In the aftermath of the Ramadi defeat, Iraqi officials have stepped up calls for more weapons and more direct support from the US and the international community.
During an international conference in Paris this week on the fight against the Islamic State group, a senior US official pledged to make it easier to get weapons, including US anti-tank rockets, to the Iraqi soldiers that need them. Meanwhile, police said a bomb exploded at a commercial street in the Taji area, just north of Baghdad, killing two people and wounding five. Another bomb blast near several shops killed three people and wounded eight in the capital's southern suburbs.
Medical officials confirmed the death toll. All officials in Baghdad and Anbar spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to journalists. Iraq sees near-daily bombings frequently claimed by the Islamic State group, which seized large parts of the country during a stunning blitz last year. The United States and its allies have conducted 14 air strikes targeting Islamic State militants in Iraq since early on Friday and an additional seven targeting them in Syria, the Combined Joint Task Force carrying out the operations said on Saturday. In Syria, air strikes using bomber, attack and fighter aircraft hit near al Hasaka and Kobani, it said in a statement. In Iraq, air strikes conducted using fighter and drone aircraft targeted areas near Baghdadi, Baiji, Habbaniyah, Haditha, Makhmur, Mosul, Sinjar and Tal Afar, it added. The air strikes were conducted between 8 a.m. local time on Friday and 8 a.m. on Saturday.
Meanwhile, the Islamic State group has shown it is prepared to use chemical weapons and is likely to have among its recruits the technical expertise to develop them, Australia's Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said. In a speech late Friday, Bishop said Australia had no doubt that the Syrian regime had used toxic chemicals including sarin and chlorine over the past four years. But she said apart from some crude and small scale endeavours, the conventional wisdom had been that the Islamic State group's intention to acquire and weaponise chemical agents was largely aspirational. "The use of chlorine by DAESH, and its recruitment of highly technically trained professionals, including from the West, have revealed far more serious efforts in chemical weapons development," she said in Perth, using the Arabic acronym for IS. "DAESH is likely to have amongst its tens of thousands of recruits the technical expertise necessary to further refine precursor materials and build chemical weapons." The use of chlorine in homemade bombs has been reported in several parts of Iraq and Syria, with car and roadside bombs easy to rig with chlorine canisters. And in March, Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan government said that analysis of soil and clothing samples showed that IS used chlorine gas in a car bomb attack in January. In a speech to the Australia Group, which works to deny licences for the export of chemical and biological-weapon related materials, Bishop said a global effort was needed to prevent the proliferation and use of the toxic chemicals. Speaking of the use of chemical weapons in Syria, she said: "The fact that atrocities such as this continue to occur shows that we must remain vigilant to the threat of chemical and biological weapons." "Export controls and their effective implementation are as important as ever as threats to global security, continue to evolve." Bishop said the rise of global terror groups such as IS was one of the gravest security threats faced by the world. Bishop has previously warned that the numbers of Australians seeking to go overseas to fight with IS was not declining, with more than 100 fighting alongside jihadist groups in Iraq and Syria. Australia has introduced a series of national security measures over the past few months to combat the threat, including criminalising travel to terror hotspots.
Elsewhere, a top US Air Force general insisted Friday the American-led air campaign against the Islamic State was effective, rejecting criticism that it was too slow or overly cautious. The bombing raids against the IS jihadists in Iraq and Syria have had a "profound effect on the enemy" and taken out "more than a 1,000 enemy fighters a month from the battlefield," said Lieutenant General John Hesterman, head of the air fleet under US Central Command. Coalition strikes have helped ground forces in Iraq and northern Syria regain territory from the IS and destroyed most of the group's oil refining capacity, Hesterman told reporters via telephone from Qatar. President Barack Obama's administration has come under criticism at home and abroad over the air campaign, with some lawmakers and retired air force officers accusing Washington of imposing too many limits on military pilots. Despite thousands of US-led coalition bombing raids since August, the IS jihadists have gained ground in Syria and last month captured the Iraqi city of Ramadi in a stunning defeat for the Baghdad government army.
Although air strikes failed to prevent the fall of Ramadi, Hesterman delivered a spirited defense of the coalition campaign, saying it could not be compared to previous air wars with more conventional targets. The general acknowledged that aircraft in roughly 75 percent of all strike flights return without dropping bombs, but he said that was because the IS militants were not a traditional army and were moving among the local civilian population. "Targeting a field army is relatively easy. That's not what we're doing," Hesterman said. "The comparisons being made to conflicts against field armies in nation-states don't apply in this case." "This enemy wrapped itself around a friendly population before we even started," he said. He said that coalition warplanes are in the air round the clock "to get after this enemy whenever we have the opportunity whenever they show themselves." "Sometimes they don't and we bring those weapons back.
That's not because we're seeing them and not killing them." Some American pilots have complained to US media that they faced cumbersome rules in the skies over Iraq and Syria that hampered their ability to go after the IS jihadists. Hesterman, however, said coalition pilots were not hamstrung and that the approval for most strikes was "measured in minutes, not hours or halves of hours." "The thought that we don't trust our pilots is just wrong," he said. Critics of the air campaign have demanded the deployment of forward air controllers with Iraqi or Kurdish forces to help guide air strikes against the IS extremists. Hesterman said spotters would "probably" be helpful but were not necessary "so far."
The general, who oversees air forces operating over Iraq and Syria, said that the IS jihadists did not appear out in the open in large numbers in the battle for Ramadi. "In Ramadi, you know, if the enemy (had) massed at Ramadi, they would be dead," he said. He said ultimately local forces - backed up by air strikes - would have to seize back ground from the IS group. "Air power doesn't hold and govern territory." The coalition also had to take care to distinguish from the air between Iraqi government forces and the IS militants, while also taking pains to avoid inadvertently killing civilians, he said. "It has never been more difficult to identify friend from foe than it is right now in Iraq. It is nearly impossible to tell them apart when they dress nearly the same and use the same equipment," the general said. "So imagine if those strikes had been made, even a fraction of them, what we call blue-on-green fratricide. My opinion is the coalition would have unwound some time ago." According to US Central Command, which oversees forces in the Middle East, there have been 15,675 coalition strike missions over Iraq and Syria, and bombs were dropped in 4,423 of those flights.
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