Iraqi pro-government forces, including Al-Abbas popular mobilization unit, take part in an operation to retake the Baiji oil refinery from Daesh. The refinery — some 200 km north of Baghdad — once produced some 300,000 barrels of refined products per day, meeting half the country’s needs. — AFP

 

BAGHDAD — Daesh (the so-called IS)  militants have dug trenches around natural gas and hydrogen tanks at Iraq’s largest refinery, raising the stakes in a battle where the price of victory may be the refinery itself.



The Baiji refinery remains contested despite more than 300 coalition air strikes in the vicinity since insurgents overran the area last June.



The militants launched their fiercest attack on the installation last month and now control large parts of the complex in which 200 Iraqi security forces are trapped.



The Pentagon last week said the outcome of the battle — in which Iraqi security forces backed by coalition warplanes are fighting to retake the refinery from Daesh militants — could not be predicted but warned it was going in “the wrong direction”.



Daesh appears to have committed itself to an all-out fight there, proving it can still seize the initiative after being ejected from the city of Tikrit further south in early April, military officials and experts say.



The battle highlights the disordered state of the security forces, which partly disintegrated last summer and must now fight on several fronts whilst holding ground they have retaken.



“We don’t sleep that much,” said Mohanad, one of the policemen trapped inside the refinery. They are fending off two or three attacks a day from the militants, who are using snipers, mortars and heat-seeking missiles.



“They (the militants) have dug trenches near the hydrogen and natural gas tanks. Aircraft cannot hit them because it is very dangerous and we could get killed too.”



The fixation of Daesh on the refinery invites comparisons with the Syrian town of Kobani, which the militants spent months trying to take from lightly armed Kurdish guerrillas.



The insurgents were eventually defeated after hundreds of US airstrikes, but the town was ruined.



“They are maintaining their momentum just like Kobani; they keep throwing people at the refinery,” said an Iraqi security source requestinganonymity.



“The only difference is that Kobani is a city and Baiji is an industrial facility, and it’s difficult to manage a fight inside an area that is surrounded 360 degrees.”



Michael Knights, fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said it would be difficult to salvage the refinery as a functioning facility.



“It’s regrettable we have to lose the refinery but now that Daeshhas committed itself to another one of these anvil type battles — the hammer’s in the air — they’ve done it Kobani and they bled themselves white”. — Reuters