Suicide attacks were another significant danger. On Nov. 14, Al-Monitor arrived at the scene of an airstrike against a car bomb roughly 22 miles west of Rawa, along a desert road used by Iraqi forces north of the Euphrates. Bottles of orange liquid, bullets, ripped military attire and charred body parts of two long-haired IS fighters were strewn across the road near the wreckage of the car, which had departed a nearby village taken earlier that morning by Iraqi forces.
A half-hour after this reporter arrived at the front, Lt. Gen. Qassem Mohammedi, the head of the Jazeera Operations Command, told Al-Monitor that another attempted car bomb attack had simultaneously been launched from a different direction, but that it, too, had been thwarted by calling in an airstrike.
The Iraqi forces retook villages and brought in necessary heavy military equipment along dusty desert tracks that IS had been using since 2014 to move its fighters to locations across Anbar and farther afield. The western Iraqi desert has long been known for its precarious security and smuggling, even before the massive assault by the international terrorist group.
The media chief for the Iraqi army’s 7th Division took Al-Monitor to the front on Nov. 14 along these same desert tracks, where various wadis, including Wadi Houran, are infamous for serving as hideouts for insurgents and criminal groups.
Maj. Gen. Numaan Abd al-Zawbaei, the commander of the 7th Division, told Al-Monitor at the front that he had years ago lost parts of several fingers on his right hand during an attack in Wadi Houran when conducting checks at a base previously held by al-Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor of IS.
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