Why Army is Stuck on Outskirts of Tikrit

“But the Islamic State outperforms us in one very important way,” says Abbas al-Saadi, a volunteer with a militia in Anbar province. “They have people who are ready to kill themselves. They fight very strongly and when they run out of ammunition, they blow themselves up.”

Al-Saadi says that the IS group also booby trap armoured military vehicles they originally stole from the Iraqi army to trick troops.

Intelligence from inside the cities is also in short supply mainly because, if the residents who were cooperating with the Iraqi army have not left for fear of being caught and killed, then they may well have been killed by the IS group.

“We used to have very good sources inside the cities controlled by the Islamic State,” one officer from Iraq's Ministry of Interior told NIQASH on condition he remain anonymous. “We found out a lot about the Islamic State's hiding places, their plans and their movements. But we have very few of these left now and most of the information we're getting has been incorrect.”  

It's going to be tough to convince Sunni Muslim locals still living in the cities controlled by the IS group, an ostensibly Sunni Muslim group, to turn against the IS fighters. Reports about how the Shiite Muslim militias have treated locals in the areas where they drove the IS group out have reached these people and there are also a number of videos online showing Sunni Muslim houses being burned and residents being arrested; often local Sunnis consider the militias just as dangerous as the IS group.

Human rights groups have released several reports on this issue and said that civilians should be protected from retaliatory attacks by pro-government forces.