Iraqi forces drive ISIS militants from refinery town of Beiji
Channel: news all the world
Date: 2014-11-14

BAGHDAD – Iraqi forces drove Islamic State militants out of the strategic oil refinery town of Beiji on Friday, handing a major defeat to the extremist group, which a U.N. panel said has denied food and medicine to hundreds of thousands of people and hidden its fighters among civilians since the start of a U.S.-led air campaignThe recapture of Beiji is the latest in a series of setbacks for the jihadi group, which has lost hundreds of fighters to airstrikes in a stalled advance on the Syrian town of Kobani and whose leader was reportedly wounded in an airstrike earlier this month.
But as it has struggled to maintain momentum on the battlefield, it has redoubled efforts to present itself as a new Islamic caliphate, with plans to launch its own currency in the vast swaths of Syria and Iraq that are still under its control.
Two Iraqi security officials said government forces backed by allied militiamen captured the town of Beiji and lifted a months-long Islamic State siege on the refinery itself — Iraq’s largest — hoisting the country’s red, white and black flags atop the sprawling complex..he Islamic State group has denied food and medicine to hundreds of thousands of people and hidden its fighters among civilians since a US-led coalition began launching air strikes in Iraq and Syria, a UN panel investigating war crimes in Syria reported on Friday.
Reached by telephone in Beiji, they said the army used loudspeakers to warn the small number of residents still holed up in the town to stay indoors while bomb squads cleared booby-trapped houses and detonated roadside bombs.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
State-run television also reported the “liberation” of Beiji, quoting the top army commander there, Gen. Abdul-Wahab al-Saadi.
Islamic State extremists captured Beiji during the summer offensive in which they swept across much of northern Iraq and captured its second largest city Mosul. The Iraqi forces collapsed in the face of the onslaught but have since partially regrouped and gone on the offensive, with Beiji the biggest locality they have recaptured to date.
The Iraqi military has since been aided by U.S.-led airstrikes targeting Islamic State positions in Iraq and in neighbouring Syria.
The two officials said fierce battles were fought early on Friday around the refinery and that government warplanes strafed Islamic State positions around the facility. The refinery’s capacity of some 320,000 barrels a day accounts for a quarter of Iraq’s refining capacity.
Video footage from Beiji aired on state television this week showed large-scale destruction in the city centre, with many buildings badly damaged or completely destroyed. One clip showed Gen. al-Saadi, surrounded by heavily armed soldiers, walking triumphantly to the headquarters of the local government at the town centre.
Beiji will now likely be a base for staging a push to take back Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit to the south. Government forces tried to retake Tikrit earlier this year, but their campaign stalled and the city remains in Islamic State hands.
In Geneva, a U.N. panel investigating war crimes in Syria said Syrians and Iraqis are subjected to an Islamic State “rule of terror,” with the calculated use of public brutality and indoctrination to ensure the submission of communities under its control.
The conclusions from the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, a four-member panel of independent experts, are based on more than 300 interviews with people who fled or are living in IS-controlled areas and on video and photographic evidence.
“Those that fled consistently described being subjected to acts that terrorize and aim to silence the population,” said Brazilian diplomat and scholar Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, who chairs the panel. He said whatever “services” the group provides to civilians is “always in the framework of this rule of terror,” similar to criminal organizations that use such means to control populations.
Commission member Vitit Muntarbhorn told reporters in Geneva the report is meant to amplify the voices of victims, who describe executions, amputations, public lashings and the use of sexual slavery, child soldiers and widespread indoctrination.
The group has “become synonymous with extreme violence directed against civilians and captured fighters,” the report said.
Humanitarian groups have been unable to reach almost 600,000 people living in the Islamic State-controlled Syrian provinces of Deir el-Zour and Raqqa, it says, and the group has obstructed the flow of medicine, doctors and nurses into Hassakeh province.
“The group deploys its fighters and materiel in close proximity to civilian areas,” the report concludes.