BEIRUT—Thousands of Iraqi troops backed by Iranian-trained Shiite Muslim militias pushed north on Monday toward Tikrit, Iraq, marking a major offensive to wrest control of the strategic and heavily symbolic city from the militant group Islamic State (IS).
The attack, involving more than 20,000 fighters along with air power, tanks and artillery, appeared to be the most concerted effort to date to expel the extremists from one of their major urban strongholds.
Helping to spearhead the assault were Shiite militiamen whose presence and ties to Shiite Iran could stoke sectarian tension tearing Iraq apart in what is likely to be a bloody thrust against a largely Sunni Muslim area. About 2,000 Sunni militia members were also lined up on the government side, authorities said.
Should the Shiite militias defeat the militants in Sunni-dominated Tikrit, they could be seen as an occupying force and may pose a problem for Prime Minister Haider Abadi’s fragile 6-month-old government in Baghdad.
On Monday Iran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency reported that Gen. Qassem Suleimani, commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force, was on hand at the battle scene outside Tikrit to “supervise and consult with the Iraqi commanders.”
Iraq’s Shiite militiamen are regarded as among the most effective forces at the government’s disposal.
Whereas Iraqi troops retreated en masse last year in the face of IS advances, Shiite militias helped defend Baghdad, the capital, and pushed back extremists allied with local Sunni factions. IS is a Sunni fundamentalist group that views Shiites as apostates and Shiite Iran as a mortal enemy.
The Shiite militiamen, enraged at IS’s mass killings of Shiites, have been accused of revenge attacks on Sunni civilians in Iraq. IS militants have executed hundreds of Shiite captives in grisly scenes uploaded to the Internet.
The operation to retake Tikrit has been dubbed “By Your Command O Prophet of God,” reported the state news outlet Al-Iraqiya.
Tikrit was the hometown of the late Saddam Hussein, the Sunni strongman who was deposed in 2003 in a US-led invasion that helped usher Iraq’s Shiite majority into power after decades of marginalization. Some Iraqi Sunnis view Saddam as a martyr who served as a bulwark against Shiite Iran and its co-religionists in Iraq.
Saddam launched a 1980s war against Iran that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and included Iraqi chemical attacks on Iranians and Iraqi Kurds.
Tikrit remains a bastion of Sunni Muslims opposed to Shiite rule in Baghdad. Many Sunnis in Tikrit and elsewhere in Iraq sided with IS forces when they swept through the area last year.
Suleimani, a shadowy figure whose image invariably pops up in sundry Middle Eastern battlefields and proxy wars, has been a longtime nemesis of the West. He has worked in concert with the forces of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite militant group in Lebanon, and with those of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has defied calls from Washington and its allies that he step down as Syria’s civil war nears its fifth year.
In Iraq, however, Suleimani and the Iranian forces oppose Islamic State, as does the United States. Neither Iran nor the US—both longtime adversaries—wants to admit publicly to such an alliance of convenience.
Los Angeles Times/TNS
Image credits: AP/Jaber Al-Helo