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August 26th, 2017 
Awake Goy 
nsnbc : Iraqi forces have driven Islamic State fighters from about 70 percent of Tal Afar and seized the citadel neighborhood in the city center. The offensive to capture the city, one of the last strongholds of ISIS in Iraq, was started on August 20.
Iraq’s Joint Operations Command stated Saturday that Iraq’s elite Counter terrorism Service liberated the citadel neighborhood and raised the Iraqi flag on top of the citadel building. Much of the Ottoman-era citadel was destroyed when ISIS militants captured it in 2014.
The statement, stressing that “Counter Terrorism Forces” captured the citadel may or may not appease Turkey’s government after Ankara protested against the presence of Shiite – Iranian-backed Hashd al-Shaabi militia in what Ankara describes as “the Turkmen city of Tal Afar”.
Tal Afar is located some 80 km (50 miles) west of Mosul. It has produced some of the self-proclaimed Islamic State’s most senior commanders which won’t surprise analysts who are aware of Turkey’s role in planning and executing the invasion of Iraq by ISIS in 2013 – 2014.
Tal Afar had a pre-war population of about 200,000. It is one of the latest major objectives in the war against ISIS in Iraq. It is expected that ISIS will be withdrawing troops from Tal Afar as well as from the likewise embattled Raqqa in Syria to scrabble for Syria’s city of Deir Ez-Zor and the oil and resource-rich Deir Ez-Zor province of Syria.
The fall of Mosul earlier this year effectively marked the beginning of the end of the self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq. Up to 2,000 militants remain in Tal Afar, according to U.S. and Iraqi military commanders. The number of civilians left in the city is between 10,000 and 20,000, according to the U.S. military.
As in the battle for Mosul, civilians are suffering. Waves of residents fled the city in the weeks before the battle started. Those remaining are threatened with death by the militants, who have held a tight grip there since 2014, according to aid organizations and residents who managed to flee.
On Tuesday, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said those who had fled were suffering from dehydration and exhaustion, having lived off unclean water and bread for three to four months. People were arriving at camps for displaced people with wounds from sniper fire and mine explosions.
CH/L – nsnbc 26.08.2017
Source Article from https://nsnbc.me/2017/08/26/iraqi-forces-capture-tal-afar-city-center-from-islamic-state/
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