The town in northern Iraq was one of the group’s last enclaves in the country.
Iraqi forces have captured the town of Hawija and the surrounding area from Daesh, the military said in a statement on Thursday.
Iraq launched an offensive on September 21 to dislodge Daesh from the area north of Baghdad where up to an estimated 78,000 people are trapped, according to the UN.
“The army’s 9th armoured division, the Federal Police, the Emergency Response division and Popular Mobilisation liberated Hawija,” a statement from the joint operations commander, Lieutenant-General Abdul Ameer Rasheed Yarallah said.
The offensive on Hawija was carried out by US-backed Iraqi government troops and Iranian-trained and armed Shia paramilitary groups known as Popular Mobilisation Forces.
With the capture of Hawija, the only area that remains under control of Daesh in Iraq is a stretch alongside the western border with Syria.
Hawija is close to the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.
TRT World’sAbubakr Al Shamahi reports from the Turkish-Iraqi border.
Control of border
Daesh militants continue to control the border town of Al Qaim and the region surrounding it.
They also hold parts of territory along Syria’s side of the border, but the area under their control is shrinking as they retreat in the face of two different sets of hostile forces – a US-backed, Kurdish-led coalition and Syrian regime troops with foreign Shia militias backed by Iran and Russia.
Daesh’s cross-border “caliphate” effectively collapsed in July, when US-backed Iraqi forces captured Mosul, the group’s de facto capital in Iraq, in a gruelling battle which lasted nine months.
The militants’ leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, who declared the caliphate from Mosul in mid-2014, released an audio recording last week that indicated he was alive, after several reports he had been killed.
He called on his followers to keep up the fight despite the setbacks.
