Displaced Iraqis who fled fighting between Islamic State (IS) militants and Iraqi Kurdish fighters in the Mosul and Anbar regions receive polio and tetanus vaccines from a health worker at a mosque where they are taking refuge in Abu Sukheir, west of the southern Iraqi city of Basra, Tuesday.

UN launches major aid operation by air and land

BAGHDAD — Iraqi forces halted a short-lived offensive on Tuesday to recapture Tikrit, home town of executed leader Saddam Hussein, due to fierce resistance from Islamic state fighters who have also threatened to attack Americans “in any place”.

In Geneva, the United Nations refugee agency announced a major aid operation to get supplies to more than half a million people displaced by fighting in northern Iraq.

Buoyed by an operation to recapture a strategic dam from the militants after two months of setbacks, Iraqi army units backed by Shiite militias launched their offensive shortly after dawn on Tikrit, a city 130 km north of Baghdad which is a stronghold of the Sunni minority.

But officers in the Iraqi forces’ operations room said by mid afternoon that the advance had stopped.

South of Tikrit, the government side came under heavy machinegun and mortar fire from the militants, a group of Arab and foreign fighters hardened by battle both in Iraq and over the border in Syria’s civil war, the officers told Reuters.

To the west, landmines and snipers frustrated efforts to get closer to the city center in the latest in a series of attempts to drive out the militants. Residents of central Tikrit said by telephone that Islamic State fighters were firmly in control of their positions and patrolling the main streets.

Fighters led by the Islamic State swept through much of northern and western Iraq in June, capturing the Sunni cities of Tikrit and Mosul as well as the Mosul dam, a fragile structure which controls water and power supplies to millions of people down the Tigris river valley.

However, on Monday fighters from Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region said they had regained control of the hydro electric dam with the help of US air strikes. US President Barack Obama also announced that the dam had been retaken. The Islamic State has concentrated on taking territory for its self-proclaimed caliphate both in Syria, where it is also fighting the forces of President Bashar Al-Assad, and in Iraq. Unlike Al-Qaeda, the movement from which it split, it has so far steered clear of attacking Western targets in or outside the region.

However, a video posted on the Internet warned Americans, in English, that “we will drown all of you in blood” if US air strikes hit Islamic State fighters. The video also showed a photograph of an American who was beheaded during the US occupation of Iraq that followed Saddam’s overthrow in 2003.

Major aid push

The UNHCR refugee agency said a four-day airlift of tents and other goods would begin on Wednesday to Arbil, capital of the Kurdish autonomous region, from the Jordanian port of Aqaba. This would be followed by road convoys from Turkey and Jordan and sea shipments from Dubai via Iran over the next 10 days, UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards said.

“This is a very, very significant aid push and certainly one of the largest I can recall in quite a while,” he told a news briefing in Geneva. “This is a major humanitarian crisis and disaster. It continues to affect many people.”

Coinciding with the Kurdish advances, Damascus government forces have stepped up air strikes on Islamic State positions in and around the city of Raqqa — its stronghold in eastern Syria.

 
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