Islamic State-controlled Fallujah is ‘tough nut to crack’, concedes Iraqi finance minister
City has been a bastion of Sunni insurgency throughout the US occupation and Shiite-led government that followed
Islamic State (IS) is putting up a tough fight in Fallujah, said Iraqi Finance Minister Hoshiyar Zebari, expecting that the capture of the city by the Iraqi army will take time.
“Fallujah is a tough nut to crack,” he said on Thursday evening. “Daesh are holding the population as hostages, not allowing them to escape, and they are putting up a tough fight there,” he added, referring to the militant group by one of its Arabic acronyms.
Fallujah, located 50km west of Baghdad, has been a bastion of the Sunni insurgency that fought both the US occupation of Iraq and the Shiite-led Baghdad government.
IS fighters raised their flag there in January 2014 before sweeping through much of Iraq’s north and west, declaring a caliphate several months later, from Mosul.
“Daesh are entrenched, Fallujah has been a problem for the new Iraq from the beginning; before it was the base of al-Qaeda, of the insurgents,” said Zebari.
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“Nobody can give you a definitive time when Fallujah will be cleared of Daesh,” he added. “Mainly because of the resistance, because of the IEDs [improvised explosive devices], because of the tunnels” the militants have dug to move without being detected.