Militant Islamist fighters closing in on Baghdad

Iraqi fighters repelled an attack at Ameriyat al-Fallujah, a strategic town 40km outside Baghdad with the help of airstrikes.

A few days after the US President Barack Obama’s candid admission that the United States underestimated the threat of Islamic State, new information surfaced indicating an imminent attack by jihadists, who are reportedly a stone’s throw from the Iraqi capital.

More specifically, according to the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East, the Islamic State are now less than 2km away from entering Baghdad.

“They said it could never happen and now it almost has,” stated a representative of the organization on his Facebook page, adding that “Obama says he overestimated what the Iraqi Army could do. Well, you only need to be here a very short while to know they can do very, very little.”

However, BBC reports that Iraqi fighters repelled an attack at Ameriyat al-Fallujah, a strategic town 40km outside Baghdad with the help of airstrikes.

“We were attacked from two sides … The fighting lasted five hours,” said a representative of the local authorities adding that soldiers, policemen and Sunni tribesmen were fighting together to defend the town.

“Warplanes eventually engaged the insurgents and killed 15 of them,” he stated.

The same official revealed that the ISIS military leader in the nearby city of Fallujah, Mullah Jassem Mohammad Hamad, was killed leading the attack.

However, the attack launched by the Iraqi forces was not enough to cause the jihadists to retreat, according to Andrew White, a vicar of the Anglican Church of St. George in Baghdad.

“The Islamic State is closing in on Baghdad. Over 1,000 Iraqi soldiers have been killed in two days,” he told BBC.