Survivors of the battle of Ramadi have revealed the devastation left behind after Iraqi government forces reclaimed the city from ISIS militants last week.
The provincial captial of Anbar, some 70miles west of Baghdad, had been under ISIS control since May last year, but now only a handful of fighters remain in the city.
Civilians who have escaped the city say they had been without food for months and that only dogs now roam the streets of Ramadi, feeding on the bodies of dead ISIS militants.
A woman who fled the city this weekend told of how Ramadi has been reduced to rubble during the battle, and that most ISIS fighters have either fled or been killed in the siege.
'We saw ISIS fighters when we left our houses, we saw their dead bodies in the streets,' she told CNN.
'Dogs are eating their heads. We only saw their hands and their legs.'
She also revealed the dire state families have been left in while ISIS has been in control of the city.
'We have been without food for two months, no water for the past ten days,' she added, speaking from a refugee camp in Habbaniyah, 25 miles east of Ramadi.
'We were surprised when we left our home and drove outside the city, we only saw destroyed houses and roads. We could not recognize the city. It looked like another city.'
Iraqi government troops have been met by civilians waving white flags as they have advanced through the ruined city over the weekend.
'They (Islamic State) are not Muslims, they are beasts,' one of the men rescued from the central district told a reporter accompanying the advancing Iraqi column.
'We thank our security forces, from the soldiers to the generals. They saved us,' the man said before breaking into tears.
Another man added that the fighters had killed seven people who refused to come with them to another district where they were making a stand.
Major Salam Hussein said that ISIS have been using families as human shields. More than 52 families had been rescued so far in the city, he said on Friday.
Another military officer, reached by telephone from the battlefield, said security forces were using loudspeakers to urge civilians to head toward the advancing troops, before calling air strikes from a U.S.-led coalition on residential blocks still held by the militants.
ISIS has recently lost control of Baiji, Sinjar and now Ramadi - all in Iraq - as well as a key dam on the Euphrates in Syria.
Recapturing Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar, was one of the most significant victories for Iraq's armed forces since ISIS swept across a third of the country in 2014.
Iraqi forces backed by US-led coalition air strikes had punched into the city centre last week, with the fighting over the final days of the battle concentrated around the former government complex.
ISIS fighters had been defending with snipers, suicide car bomb attacks and hundreds of roadside bombs and booby traps.The advance by the government forces had also been hampered by the possible presence of dozens of families trapped in the combat zone and used by ISIS as human shields.
After Ramadi, the army plans to move to retake the northern city of Mosul, the biggest population centre under ISIS control in Iraq and Syria.
Dislodging the militants from Mosul, which had a pre-war population close to two million, would effectively abolish their state structure in Iraq and deprive them of a major source of funding, which comes partly from oil and partly from fees and taxes on residents.
Patrick Martin, Iraq analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, said the Ramadi win was the reversal of an earlier loss and would fall short of seriously crippling IS in the area.
'ISIS (IS) remains capable of launching attacks across Iraq without Ramadi, which is more significant for the Iraqi security forces and the Iraqi government than it ever was for ISIS,' he said
Source dailymail
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