Fight for Falluja begins
Iraqi army launches concerted effort to retake the city from IS; suicide bombings kill 20 in Baghdad
The Iraqi army stormed to the southern edge of Falluja under US air support yesterday and captured a police station inside the city limits, launching a direct assault to retake one of the main strongholds of Islamic State militants.
A Reuters TV crew about a mile from the city's edge said explosions and gunfire were ripping through Naimiya, a district of Falluja on its southern outskirts.
An elite military unit, the Rapid Response Team, seized the district's police station at midday, state television reported.
The battle for Falluja is shaping up to be one of the biggest ever fought against Islamic State, in the city where US forces waged the heaviest battles of their 2003-2011 occupation against the Sunni Muslim militant group's precursors.
Falluja is Islamic State's closest bastion to Baghdad, and believed to be the base from which the group has plotted an escalating campaign of suicide bombings against Shia civilians and government targets inside the capital.
As government forces pressed their onslaught, suicide bombers driving a car and a motorcycle and another bomb planted in a car killed more than 20 people and injured more than 50 in three districts of Baghdad, police and medical sources said.
Separately, Kurdish security forces announced advances against Islamic State in northern Iraq, capturing villages from militants outside Mosul, the biggest city under militant control.
The Iraqi army launched its operation to recover Falluja a week ago, first by tightening a six-month-old siege around the city 50 km west of Baghdad.
Yesterday, army units advanced to the city's southern entrance, "steadily advancing" under air cover from a US-led coalition helping to fight against the militants, according to a military statement read out on state TV.
The latest offensive is causing alarm among international aid organization over the humanitarian situation in the city, where more than 50,000 civilians remain trapped with limited access to water, food and health care.
Falluja is the second-largest Iraqi city still under control of the militants, after Mosul, their de facto capital in the north that had a pre-war population of about 2 million.
It would be the third major city in Iraq recaptured by the government after Saddam's home town Tikrit and Ramadi, the capital of Iraq's vast western Anbar province.