ISIS aims at Baghdad
BAGHDAD: Using secret tunnels built by Saddam Hussein and rough terrain to outfox Iraqi troops, ISIS insurgents are getting dangerously close to Baghdad with the support of heavily armed Sunni tribesmen, Iraqi security and intelligence officials said.
The Al-Qaeda offshoot has made new bold advances in the north, reaching a major dam and seizing a fifth oil field and three more towns after routing security forces from the autonomous Kurdish region.
But some Iraqi intelligence and security officials are far more alarmed by the group’s less heralded campaign in rural areas just south of the capital, the rugged Euphrates valley terrain once known to U.S. forces as the “triangle of death.”
While ISIS’ march on Baghdad from the north has been halted near the town of Samarra 100 kilometers from the city limits, the fighters have more quietly building up their forces on the capital’s southern outskirts.
“We told the government that urgent military operations are essential to prevent ISIS from taking over further towns south of Baghdad; otherwise they will be very close to the capital,” said Falah al-Radhi, head of a security panel in the provincial council of Hilla, just south of Baghdad.
For several weeks, the Sunni insurgents have been moving fighters, weapons and supplies from strongholds in western Iraq through secret desert tunnels to the town of Jurf al-Sakhar, about 60 kilometers south of Baghdad.
Built by Saddam in the 1990s to hide weapons from U.N. weapons inspectors, the tunnels are also ideal hiding places that allow fighters to avoid military helicopters.
ISIS militants occupying the city of Fallujah and parts of Ramadi, where U.S. troops once faced a stubborn Al-Qaeda insurgency, access the tunnels from an area near military facilities once used by Saddam’s troops.
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