Retaking all of Iraq’s Anbar out of reach for now

Baghdad has announced its next battle against the Islamic State group is retaking Anbar province, but analysts say entrenched jihadists and limited Iraqi forces put a full reconquest out of reach for now.

Anbar is by far Iraq’s largest province, shares a border with jihadist-held territory in Syria and has historically been a difficult area to control.

Iraqi security forces and allied paramilitaries are on a high after retaking most of Salaheddin province and its capital Tikrit in recent weeks, but those victories will not be easy to replicate.

“Anbar differs from Tikrit and Salaheddin more broadly because IS is much more entrenched there,” said Kirk Sowell, the publisher of the Inside Iraqi Politics newsletter.

Jihadist fighters had a presence in Anbar long before the June 2014 offensive that saw the government lose around a third of the country to IS.

“This will have to be a limited-goals campaign to be successful,” Sowell said.

After recapturing Tikrit, some expected government and allied forces to continue their push towards Mosul, which is Iraq’s second city and IS’s main hub.

But Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced on April 8 that “our next stand and battle will be here in the land of Anbar to completely liberate it.”

Anbar is a vast arid expanse traversed by the Euphrates River, stretching east from the Baghdad governorate to the western borders with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria.

Its capital is the city of Ramadi, much of which is under IS control, while the jihadists hold all of the city of Fallujah, which lies between it and Baghdad.