Pres. Rouhani: Iraqs unity, territorial integrity important for Iran
Iran #39;s President Hassan Rouhani says Iraq #39;s national unity and territorial integrity is highly important for Tehran. Rouhani stressed that only a united Iraq can help maintain security...
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Pres. Rouhani: Iraqs unity, territorial integrity important for Iran - Video
The Kurds Can #39;t Afford to Leave Iraq
London For the two families that govern the Kurdistan Region of the Barzanis and Talabanis the Islamic State #39;s rampage across Iraq this past summer represented an unprecedented...
By: Kelly Fish
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The Kurds Can't Afford to Leave Iraq - Video
Oil trucks queue at the Iraqi Northern Oil Refinery near the town of Baiji, 10 November 2007. Getty
Last Updated Nov 11, 2014 3:00 PM EST
BAGHDAD - Iraqi soldiers battling the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) recaptured most of the town of Beiji, home to the country's largest oil refinery, state television and a provincial governor said Tuesday.
The strategic town, 155 miles north of Baghdad, will likely be a base for a future push to take back Saddam Hussein's hometown just to the south, one of the main prizes overrun by the extremists last summer. But troops backed by Shiite militias faced pockets of stiff resistance around Beiji, hindering their advance.
There was no word on the fate of the refinery, which lies on Beiji's northern outskirts, but the advances in the town could help break the five-month siege of the facility by ISIS. Since June, a small army unit inside the refinery, resupplied and reinforced by air, has successfully resisted wave after wave of extremist assaults.
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Lifting the siege of the refinery, which sits inside a sprawling complex, was likely the next objective in the campaign to rid Beiji of the militants, according to military officials reached in the town by telephone.
Hours after news from Beiji broke, a suicide bomber rammed his explosives-laden car into a military outpost in the Tarmiyah district north of Baghdad, killing seven soldiers and wounding 13 others, according to police and hospital officials. Those killed included the post's commander, a major, and two other officers, a captain and lieutenant, they said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but it bore the hallmarks of the militant Sunnis of ISIS. Also, nine people were killed and 24 injured in three separate blasts in and around Baghdad.
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Iraq claims key victory over ISIS
Iraqi officials said Tuesday that government forces had captured Baiji after fierce battles for the city, home to the nation's largest oil refinery, but anti-government militants insisted they remained in control.
Iraqi Defense Minister Khaled Obeidi issue a statement lauding the military "for the great victory that was achieved in purifying [Baiji] district from the filth of ... the gangs of Daesh," using the Arabic acronym for the militant group Islamic State.
The state news network showed images Tuesday of jubilant soldiers and allied masked militiamen atop columns of Humvees and tanks reported to be going through central Baiji, about 125 miles north of Baghdad, the capital.
Islamic State, however, insisted in a statement on a number of militant and Islamic forums that Baiji remained in militants' hands and that the "battle is ongoing."
Both sides in the Iraqi conflict have falsely touted battlefield advances and denied losses of territory. Restricted access to the Iraqi war zone has made it difficult to reconcile conflicting assertions in Baiji and elsewhere.
Al Sumaria News, an Iraqi pro-government news outlet, reported Tuesday that seven people were killed and another seven wounded when three Islamic State suicide bombers with explosives belts targeted a gathering of Iraqi security forces and civilians in central Baiji.
Fighters of Islamic State, an Al Qaeda offshoot, seized the city in June as part of a lightning advance that saw the militants overrun vast portions of northern and western Iraq, including the city of Mosul, Iraqs second most populous city.
The United States subsequently launched an air war against Islamic State forces in Iraq and neighboring Syria. U.S. bombardment has targeted Islamic State positions in and around Baiji in support of the Iraqi military, as well as elsewhere in Iraq.
Retaking Baiji would mark a significant victory for pro-government forces, who have been struggling to regain terrain lost to Islamic State across Iraq. The Iraqi military is working in tandem with Shiite Muslim militias loyal to the Shiite-dominated administration of Prime Minister Haider Abadi.
The Iraqi forces' capture of Baiji could relieve pressure on the nearby refinery complex, which has remained in government hands but has been besieged by extremist fighters. The Iraqi army has airlifted supplies via helicopter into the vast refinery.
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Iraq forces and militants battle for control of Baiji
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Editor's note: Erin Evers is the Iraq researcher for Human Rights Watch. You can follow her @ErinHRW. The views expressed are her own.
(CNN) -- The 30-mile highway from Kifri to Tuz Khurmatu in northern Iraq is a no-man's-land dotted with motley gatherings of thousands of displaced families, caught between the cruelty of ISIS forces and targeted by militias backed by Iraq's government.
In August, these people lived in towns around Tuz and Amerli, at the epicenter of fighting in which the militias, Iraqi security forces and Kurdish Peshmerga, assisted by U.S.-led airstrikes, supposedly drove ISIS forces (ISIS calls itself the Islamic State) from the area. No one stayed to protect civilians from the aftermath; their homes were looted and burned by militias, they say, after ISIS pulled out.
Now, several thousand families from this region, about 90 kilometers south of Kirkuk, are eking out an existence in makeshift shelters along the road, caught between contested territory and the mountains leading to the relative safety of Iraq's Kurdish region. At a defunct chicken factory, I met some 40 families who said they had been living there for two months without a visit, let alone any assistance, from humanitarian organizations or government officials.
Despite warnings from international aid agencies about deteriorating conditions for people displaced by conflict in other parts of Iraq, these communities have been overlooked. Their current residences -- the chicken factory, a school, makeshift tents -- are too dangerous to visit, according to representatives of local humanitarian organizations.
A woman named Shahlaa says that like many of the people forced from the towns around Tuz and Amerli, she was displaced twice: first when ISIS entered her town and warned of an impending battle, and then when militias attacked the village to which she had fled with her husband and three small children.
"We didn't get to stay there very long," Shahlaa said of the village. After a week she saw dozens of SUVs, armored vehicles and pickup trucks approaching. She watched, terrified, as "so, so many" pro-government militiamen dressed in black piled out carrying automatic weapons. "They started shooting in the air and at the ground, they just wanted to scare us out of there," she said.
But the militia leniency didn't last very long. After driving ISIS fighters from the area between Kifri and Amerli, the militias began looting and burning homes. Families described how, after running for their lives, they sat on a hillside overlooking their towns and watched them burn.
They are not alone. Militias have emptied almost 80 towns of their Sunni residents, a sheikh in Kirkuk told me. Other sheikhs, security and government officials, and some of those displaced have said the same. Yet none of the displaced from these towns has received aid, he said. The sheikh said that militiamen forced him out by setting fire to his home and scrawling their unit names on his walls well after ISIS had left the area: the Badr Brigades, Saraya al-Salam, Kita'ib Hezbollah, and Saraya al-Khorasani. These are all powerful Shia militias with high-level representatives in Iraq's government.
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Don't forget Iraq's displaced