Iraq On Track To Freeing Itself From Daesh - Former Iraqi DPM

By Siti Radziah Hamzah ASTANA, Aug 28 (Bernama) -- Iraq is strengthening its forces to eliminate the threat of the Daesh terror group and is on track to liberating the country from the Daesh grip by year-end, said former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Hussain Al Shahristani. He said Iraq had liberated more than 75 per cent of the country since it began operations more than a year ago to weed out terror attacks conducted by Daesh, which had overrun significant territories in northeastern Syria and northwestern Iraq since 2014. Shahristani said attempts to liberate three provinces, among them Tal Afar and Hawija, from the Daesh threat were ongoing. "During this campaign, Iraqi forces managed so far to eliminate about 28,000 terrorists. That is a very significant number and half of them were killed in the city of Mosul alone. "These forces had fought one of the most difficult and intense battles since World War II. Protection of civilians was top priority for the Iraqi forces," said Shahristani during the plenary session of the 62nd Pugwash Conference on ‘Science and World Affairs: Confronting New Nuclear Dangers’ on Sunday. The force's battle against the extremist group had received overwhelming support from the Iraqis as their counter-terrorism unit received 300,000 applications to fill 3,000 vacant positions in the force. On Sunday, the Iraqi forces were on the verge of recapturing the city of Tal Afar after driving Daesh fighters from the centre of one of their last urban strongholds in the country. The advance, less than a week into an assault on the strategic city, comes after Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared victory in July over the fighters in Iraq's second city Mosul, where Daesh declared its "caliphate" in 2014. "There are about 4,000 terrorists in the three areas and although official figures have not been announced yet, it is expected that 2,000 of them will be eliminated in Tal Afar alone, which brings the total number of terrorists killed in Iraq to 30,000," said Shahristani. A concerted effort is needed to eliminate the threat of Daesh and its affiliates from expanding, he added. "The world should realise that Daesh and its comrades are a real threat to all. No country should wait for one of its cities to be attacked and its citizens to be murdered to comprehend the seriousness of this threat. "It is not sufficient to draw local, even national, plans to deal with it. The terror group should be fought at the local to global level, not only in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria but all the countries where jihadists have been recruited," said Shahristani. Meanwhile, Kazakhstan Deputy Foreign Minister Roman Vassilenko said the country was imposing punishment on its citizens who fled to fight the Daesh, including stripping them of their citizenship while also establishing a policy body, the Ministry of Civil Society and Religious Affairs, to stop extremist ideologies from spreading further. The move, he said, was established after a series of attacks in the oil-rich state last year. "According to our security service, we had about 300 Kazakhs leaving the country for Iraq and Syria. This outflow is small but it has been stamped out. "There have been cases where people fighting there were returning, and they were arrested and prosecuted because our law makes it illegal to fight in a foreign war," he said at a selected media interview at the Kazakhstan administrative capital. -- BERNAMA