Why Army is Stuck on Outskirts of Tikrit

When the Islamic State controls a city they immediately begin to protect the borders of the territory, planting improvised explosive devices on the roads and in houses, they deploy snipers and they prepare car bombs so they can detonate them if the area comes under attack.

The IS fighters who escaped from the nearby towns under attack from the Iraqi army are now all thought to be in Tikrit, where they have organised themselves to hold the city. So far they have been successful in doing this – and they are also using the situation to attack Iraqi forces on the outskirts of the city.

Worryingly the same thing appears to be happening elsewhere too. In the province of Anbar, Iraqi forces have surrounded the smaller, strategic city of Karmah. The troops, some of whom were based in Baghdad, went into battle to try and ensure that the fighting did not get closer to the capital while the Tikrit offensive was on and they managed to capture areas around Karmah.

However due to fierce resistance from IS fighters inside central Karmah, the Iraqi forces were ordered to come to a halt and simply surround the city.

Similar situations have arisen in larger cities like Fallujah and Heet, where the Iraqi army has managed to surround the city but not been able to enter it. Basically it seems that the Iraqi army and their allies have been unable to take one major city back from the extremists so far – they've only been able to reclaim smaller towns that are more agricultural or tribal in nature.

Critics suggest there may be three main reasons for this lack of success. It is clear that the IS group has become skilled at street warfare, fighting from house to house and street to street – quite possibly skills their experienced fighters picked up in Syria. In order to defeat the IS group in this arena, there are three things needed that neither the Iraqi army nor the Shiite militias have. These are soldiers specially trained in urban warfare, intelligence and information from inside the cities themselves and the trust of the cities' residents.

When it comes to urban warfare, the most experienced of the Shiite Muslim militias have done this before, certainly more than the Iraqi army has and in particular when they fought against US troops in Iraq after 2003 and then against other sectarian militias between 2006 and 2008.