BAGHDAD: Iraqi forces raised the national flag over the main government compound in Fallujah on Friday, top commanders said, a breakthrough in the nearly four-week-old offensive against the militant Islamic State group’s bastion.

They met limited resistance from IS fighters, who were fleeing the city, the commanders said, leaving the organisation on the brink of losing one of the most emblematic strongholds in its two-year-old “caliphate”.

It is the latest setback for the jihadists who have also lost territory in neighbouring Syria and in Libya in recent weeks, although US Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan warned on Thursday that they remain a formidable force with global reach.

“The counterterrorism service and the rapid response forces have retaken the government compound in the centre of Fallujah,” the operation’s overall commander, Lieutenant General Abdulwahab al-Saadi, said.

Raed Shaker Jawdat, Iraq’s federal police chief, confirmed the advance.

“The liberation of the government compound, which is the main landmark in the city, symbolises the restoration of the state’s authority” in Fallujah, he said.

Saadi said the Iraqi flag was raised above government buildings in the compound and claimed that “Iraqi forces have now liberated 70 per cent of the city”.

In the deserted, recently reconquered neighbourhoods of the insurgent bastion known in Iraq as the “City of Mosques”, elite forces were consolidating positions, stocking up on food and weapons.

Dozens of bodies of IS fighters were left to rot under blankets amid the rubble of homes destroyed by air strikes, rockets or controlled explosions of the hundreds of bombs the jihadists themselves laid across the city.

The government lost control of Fallujah in 2014, months before IS took second city Mosul and swept across large parts of the country.

Fallujah, which lies just 50 kilometres west of Baghdad, is one of IS’s key historical bastions and its loss would leave Mosul as the only major Iraqi city under its control.

The US-led coalition, which has carried out air strikes in support of the Fallujah operation, had initially favoured focusing efforts on recapturing Mosul.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who was facing huge political pressure over the reform of his own government when he declared the launch of the Fallujah operation, has vowed to defeat IS nationwide by the end of the year. In the hours running up to the latest push into the heart of Fallujah, Iraqi forces retook several neighbourhoods in quick succession.

“This operation was done with little resistance from Daesh,” Saadi said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

Published in Dawn, June 18th, 2016