An Iraqi official says army forces, backed by volunteers, are set to launch an operation in the near future to retake the central city of Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar, from the ISIL Takfiri terrorists.

“The operation will not begin in the next few hours, but in the coming days,” Ahmed al-Assadi, a spokesman for the Popular Mobilization forces, who also serves as a lawmaker, told AFP on Friday.

Touching on the scale of the operation, Assadi said, “It will be a wide operation involving tens of thousands of security forces and Hashed al-Shaabi,” using the Arabic name for the Popular Mobilization forces.

He noted that the upcoming offensive is primarily aimed at stopping any further advance by the Takfiri terrorists.

On May 17, the ISIL militants managed to bring Ramadi under their control.

The Popular Mobilization forces, one of the volunteer groups who have joined the Iraqi army, were dispatched to Anbar after Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi called on them to join the fight to drive the Takfiri militants out of Ramadi.

Ramadi refugees

Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said on Friday that around 55,000 people had fled Ramadi since mid-May.

Edwards added that about 90 percent of those who had fled the Iraqi city remained in Anbar Province.

Meanwhile, Takfiri terrorists seized a highway between the Syrian capital city of Damascus and the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, late Thursday.

Government forces withdrew from the area as the ISIL militants captured the al-Tanaf crossing, also known as al-Walid in Iraq, the Al-Iraq Al-Hurr Radio reported.

Iraqi forces’ achievements

In a separate development, Iraqi forces killed 15 ISIL militants in an operation in the Hasibah district located east of the city of Ramadi on Friday.

Iraqi troops also killed 8 ISIL elements as the terrorists launched an attack at a checkpoint in the west of the city of Tikrit in the northern Iraqi province of Salahuddin.

The northern and western parts of Iraq have been in chaos since ISIL started its campaign of terror there in early June 2014.

Since then, the Iraqi army has been joined by Kurdish forces as well as Shia and Sunni volunteers in operations to drive the ISIL terrorists out of the areas they once seized.

SSM/GHN/HJL