05 June 2014

The contagion in Anbar seems to have spread to Salahuddin governorate, and the only crossing that was available for Anbaris on their way to Baghdad has been closed in Samarra, one of biggest districts in Salahuddin, with a population of more than 500,000 inhabitants.

Since 04:00 a.m. today, more than 150 ISIL gunmen have been able to seize control of the eastern parts of Samarra - about 40% of the province. Army and police forces withdrew suddenly from the checkpoints in those areas. Some police and army vehicles were burned and an initial count shows that 55 people - mostly police and army personnel - have been killed or wounded in Samarra. A very large re-enforcement operation is underway to Samarra, and air raids have been launched against some of the groups of gunmen within the city. The security situation is in a state of confusion, while security forces have imposed a curfew on Samarra, as well as on several other districts in the governorate as a precautionary measure to prevent a security collapse such as that which took place in Samarra. Security forces are also stating that they will re-establish control within the next few hours.

In Fallujah, the civilian exodus is still underway and the city will soon be emptied of its civilian inhabitants. Dr. Ahmed Al-Shami, the senior resident at the Fallujah General Hospital, announced today that the shelling of Fallujah has since last night killed 8 residents and wounded 10 others, among them 4 women and 2 children.

An important development has been the shooting down of an aircraft ; it crashed in the Al-Sichir, northeast of Fallujah, according to eyewitness reports.

Some Ramadi areas are relatively calm and other areas are tense, with occasional widely-dispersed gunfire. We have observed the return of more than 6,000 residents to their homes in some of the districts of central and west-central Ramadi.

The conference called by Nouri Al-Maliki aimed at getting the displaced families home for the month of Ramadan is still being supported by some and rejected by others. Both the residents and the local government have rejected plans to build new residential districts to replace those that have been severely damaged; the districts are being described as historically important. They are also concerned that they will lose money by giving up their centrally located homes by being moved out into the city's outlying areas.