Operation Featherweight: Month 8, Week 2, Day 6.

Yesterday (11/3/15) the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) began their final assault to liberate the city of Tikrit from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in what is seen as a test of the battles to come.

Although I don't think they cleared every street house-by-house the ISF were very rapidly able to dominate the areas of tactical importance within the city. So by yesterday evening they'd secured everything in the north down to the industrial zone and everything from the south up to the teaching hospital. This left little more then 100 ISIL fighters were left clinging onto an area around the presidential complex and the old neighbourhood.

Today the ISF moved into those areas and declared them liberated at around 12:30 GMT (15:30 local). As a result the city of the Tikrit is now considered fully liberated some two days ahead of schedule.

Despite the liberation being complete there is still a lot work to be done conducting house-to-house searches looking any ISIL fighters who may have gone into hiding and dismantling the vast number of landmines and Improvised Explosive Devices (IED's) that ISIL have left littering the city.

The task of clearing these IED's is being made all the more difficult because a significant proportion of them are not conventional IED's. Instead they have been rigged to release a cloud of chlorine gas when they explode making them examples of prohibited chemical weapons.

It will be interesting to see how the US reacts to this developments because their Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power in particular has been a very vocal crusader against the use of chlorine gas in Syria. Presumably she will be displaying the same level of outrage at its use by ISIL in Iraq even if it does significantly undermine the claim that the Syrian government has been using chemical weapons in its fight against ISIL.

A possible explanation of why the operation to liberate Tikrit has been so successful is that ISIL fighters are suspected of fleeing to the al-Huwaija district which is to the north-east of the city. Fortunately on Monday (9/3/15) the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga launched an offensive pushing south-west from the city of Kirkuk to meet ISIL in al-Huwaija.

That operation was completed on Tuesday (10/3/15) and it has since been confirmed that not only did the Peshmerga liberate the villages of Sakhra, Wadi Naft and Sada they also achieved the main objective which was a tactically important ridge and parts of the main Tikrit-Kirkuk road which should limit ISIL ability to attack either Tikrit or Kirkuk from al-Huwaija district.

Also on Monday the ISF launched an offensive against ISIL positions surrounding the town of Karma which is around 8km (4.8 miles) north-east of Fallujah which itself is around 45km (27 miles) west of the Iraqi capital Baghdad. That operation continued into Wednesday and the estimated ISIL death toll has now risen to over 450.

Perhaps buoyed by their success in Tikrit and Karma the ISF have today started attacking ISIL positions within Fallujah itself which could be a precursor to the liberation of the city. However there is a concern that the ISF may again find themselves overstretched.

In an effort to arrest their decline ISIL yesterday launched a large scale assault on the ISF held areas of Ramadi which sits around 50km (30 miles) north-west of Fallujah along the Euphrates River. This attack did not amount to anything and seems to have been centred around detonating 17 vehicle borne IED's (VBIED's) while blasting the ISF positions with artillery fire. It appears that one of the VBIED's was being driven by Jake Bilardi - an 18 year old Australian who travelled to join ISIL in late 2014 - who is believed to have died in what was always intended to be a suicide attack.

In the last hour or so reports have begun to emerge that 22 ISF soldiers were killed in a suspected friendly fire air-strike on Ramadi. The US-led coalition has denied any involvement. I'm inclined to believe them because one of the defining features of the attack on Ramadi has been the coalition's seemingly complete abandonment of the ISF.

At the same time as the assault began on Ramadi ISIL also launched a assault on the town of Serekanyie/Ras al-Ayn which sits on the western edge of the Kurdish Cizire Canton in northern Syria. Worryingly I have been unable to find any information about how this battle is progressing. However it is clear that the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) who are defending have not received any support from the US-led coalition. In fact the coalition did not conduct a single air-strike anywhere in Syria yesterday.

On Tuesday though the coalition did carry out a single air-strike in the vicinity of Tel Tamir which sits on the southern edge of the Cizire Canton. That strike destroyed a ISIL fuel pumping station. That seems a particularly low priority target to strike because for the best part of a week now the YPG have been trying to resist a sustained attack by ISIL on Tel Tamir. Over the past 24 hours the town and it's surrounding villages have come under continuous heavy fire from ISIL artillery and mortar positions.

Those ISIL heavy weapons positions seem to me to be prime targets for coalition air-strikes.

Away from the fighting itself Turkey announced that it has arrested a foreign national who is the agent of third nation for helping those three British teenage girls cross into Syria to join ISIL. Although the Turks have ruled out that this man was working for a US or EU spy agency they have confirmed that he was working for the spy agency of another nation in the US-led coalition.

With the regional Sulaimani Forum conference taking place this is partial release of information was intended to create speculation that the arrested man was working for either Saudi or Qatari intelligence. Under Erdogan Turkey's allegiance with Qatar to support the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has led to a degree of tension with Saudi Arabia. Obviously events in Kobane have also created a degree of tension between Erdogan and the Kurdish parties whose support he needs in the upcoming June election.

Primarily though the concern is that this spy has been arrested not for being part of a Turkish group channelling jihadists to ISIL but because he was providing information about that group to the coalition.

18:25 on 12/3/15 (UK date).