Operation Featherweight: Month 8, Week 2, Day 4.

At dawn today the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) moved into the town of al-Alam which sits some 7km (4 miles) to the north-east of Tikrit largely unopposed. The purpose of this seems to be to cut off any potential escape by fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) from Tikrit into the al-Huwaija district.

As a result the ISF seem to be in their final assault positions for the liberation of Tikrit itself. There are some reports that operation has begun this evening although that has not been confirmed and they may just be probing, reconnaissance operations.

A clearer picture has begun to emerge of the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga's operation in al-Huwaija district yesterday. It's now been confirmed that they swept 30-40km (18-24 miles) south-west of Kirkuk City liberating the villages of Sakhra, Wadi Naft and Sada as they went. In the is effort the Peshmerga we assisted by 4 coalition air-strikes that destroyed multiple fighting positions, ground units and vehicles. 10 Peshmerga lost their lives in the operation including 3 Iranian-Kurdish volunteers while 100 ISIL fighters were confirmed killed.

Seemingly in response to the Kurdish operations south-west of Kirkuk ISIL overnight launched an attack on the Peshmerga front-line 30km (18 miles) from the regional capital of Arbil. After several hours of fighting this attack was repulsed at the cost of one Peshmerga dead and another wounded. There is as yet no word on ISIL casualties but several of their armoured vehicles were destroyed.

Also yesterday the ISF launched an operation against ISIL positions around Karma 8km (4.8 miles) north-east of Fallujah which itself is around 45km (27 miles) west of the Iraqi capital Baghdad. Here they were assisted by the coalition which carried out 3 air-strikes which destroyed two large ISIL ground units and several ISIL vehicles. The ISF estimate that 350 ISIL fighters were killed in the operation but that has not been confirmed.

17:45 on 10/3/15 (UK date).

Edited at around 21:32 to on 10/3/15 (UK date) to add;

Apparently the above needs padding so;

Today the Home Affairs select committee of the UK House of Commons has met to discuss those three girls who recently ran away from home to join ISIL. It's not that this received a lot of coverage in the western media but at one point I realised that if you flicked channels really quickly you could see what had been shown live on BBC News repeated on Sky News and then again on CNN International.

The meeting actually had three stages with the families of the missing girls (henceforth known as; "The Sultanas") giving evidence followed by representatives of London's Metropolitan Police and the UK Ambassador for Turkey.

I found the sequence involving the Sultanas particularly unedifying not least because the chair of the committee Keith Vaz was in a particularly stroppy mood. At one point he demanded that the person with the cough left the chamber because they were making it hard to concentrate.

Mainly though I found this sequence unpleasant because it was essentially a group of MP's demanding that the teenage older sister and elderly father of Sahima Begum explain everything that was wrong with the UK's counter-terrorism legislation with specific reference to Jihadists wishing to join ISIL. Their only response they could reasonably come up with to all this was;

"We don't know. Two months ago we'd never had to think about it. This ISIL b*llocks of establishing the Levant to bring about the apocalyptic war between Sunnis and Shias doesn't normally come up at Mosque!!"

The person I choose to blame for all this is the lawyer Tasnime Akunjee who seems to have decided that he is representing all of the Sultanas. Coming very much from the "If there's blame there's a claim" school of law Akunjee has decided that it is the police were at fault for not realising that 3 girls who their families and school didn't realise were going to run away to join ISIL were going to run away to join ISIL. Mr Akunjee of course also objects to the polices attempts to speak to either the girl's families,the girl's school or in fact any Muslim.

In short Mr Akunjee is a sh*t lawyer. However I will concede that the police should probably have sent their letter directly to the Sultanas parents rather then handing it to the school for the standard "letter home" routine. This is though a non-standard situation and we are all learning.

I am though rather disappointed that despite everyone rushing to cover the Sultanas evidence no-one found the time to cover the Turkish Ambassador's evidence. After all with the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) still struggling to get Turkey to comply with it's resolutions on ISIL and Foreign Ministries across the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) struggling to get Turkey to comply with it's membership commitments it's a bit much demanding that the Met police achieve where so many others have failed.