Iraq declares end of Islamic State caliphate after the recapture of iconic Mosul mosque

Iraq has announced that it has finally recapture the ruins of a historic mosque at the heart of Islamic State's de facto capital in Mosul where Islamic State chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed its self-styled caliphate exactly three years ago, marking the “end” of the jihadists’ state, Iraqi’s prime minister said on Thursday. 

We are seeing the end of the fake Daesh state,” Haider al-Abadi wrote on Twitter account, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

We will keep following Daesh until we kill and capture the last member in Iraq,” he wrote in another twitter post.

 

The almost 850-year-old Grand al-Nuri mosque was destroyed earlier this month by the Islamic State that was once the symbolic center of its self-declared caliphate. 

The victory comes after eight months of urban warfare. Iraqi authorities expect the long battle for Mosul to end in the coming days as remaining Islamic State fighters are bottled up in just a handful of neighborhoods of the Old City. 

The group declared its self-styled “caliphate” across swathes of Iraq and Syria on June 29, 2014, prompting the formation of a US-led coalition in a bid to halt its advance. Since that time, it's biggest fall was in the first six months of 2017, when IS lost around 24,000 square kilometres of territory.

The return of al-Nuri Mosque and al-Hadba minaret to the fold of the nation marks the end of the Daesh state of falsehood," Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said in a statement.

The fall of Mosul would in effect mark the end of IS caliphate in Iraq, although the group still controls territory west and south of the city, ruling over hundreds of thousands of people.

A U.S.-backed Kurdish-led coalition besieging Raqqa on Thursday fully encircled it after closing the militants' last way out from the south, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.

These setbacks have reduced Islamic State's territory by 60 percent from its peak two years ago, however, it still occupies an area as big as Belgium, across Iraq and Syria, according to IHS Markit, an analytics firm.

Thousands of military and civilian casualties are estimated to have been killed with about 900,000 people, nearly half the pre-war population of the northern city, have fled, mostly taking refuge in camps or with relatives and friends, according to aid groups reports Reuters.