On Wednesday, Qatari al-Samarmad, a commander at Anbar’s mobilization forces, was quoted by IkhNews saying that iraqi army fighter jets pounded an Islamic State hideout in Wadi Hawran, west of the province, and killed 27 Islamic State members, including foreign nationals, in an air raid. He also added that during the airstrikes a number of vehicles belonging to the militants were destroyed. During a weekly press briefing at the cabinet’s building in Baghdad, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared that security forces had cleared “14,000 square kilometers” of al-Jazirah, a desert region surrounded by Anbar, Salahuddin and Nineveh provinces, from Islamic State vestiges. “At a military level, Islamic State in Iraq is over,” Abadi announced, declaring the collapse of Islamic State’s territorial influence in Iraq with the recapture of Rawa, a city on Anbar’s western borders with Syria, which was the group’s last bastion in Iraq. He also had said that final victory over IS would be proclaimed after al-Jazirah total cleaning.
