He estimates that approximately 5,000 IS fighters remain in Hawija. Most of the fighters who carried out a massive attack on Kirkuk late last year that killed over a hundred people use Hawija as a base, along with many who still continue to carry out attacks across Salahuddin province.
“Iraq has no safe border with Saudi Arabia,” Hashimi noted. The Anbar region that straddles the border with Syria has seen a recent uptick in attacks, and some reports say that IS fighters there are using tunnels to conduct attacks on Iraqi noncombat troops stationed there, who are “untrained and unequipped to engage in such fighting.”
The desert region, long a stronghold for insurgent activity, encompasses roughly one-third of Iraqi soil.
In an interview with Al-Monitor at the Hammam al-Alil base, Lt. Gen. Raed Shaker Jawdat, the head of the federal police, called Mosul “the devil’s nest.” He said it was necessary to get rid of and that although taking it would not mean an end to IS, it would be an extremely significant victory.
He told Al-Monitor that IS’ vast administrative and financial system that underpinned its activities has transformed the group “simply into a gang.”
Hashimi, however, cautioned that the daily reports sent out by the Iraqi War Media Cell to journalists are “pure propaganda,” joking that “if you calculate the number of dead IS in the statements, it will total almost the entire population of China.”
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