In northeast Iraq, flashes of resistance against IS militants
(The Christian Science Monitor) Upon a small card table set in the mud, on ground once controlled by the Islamic State, an Iraqi Army colonel unrolls his well-worn map of central and eastern Iraq.
Methodically he points out how the Army has worked in concert in recent months with Kurdish peshmerga units and Shi‘ite militias to flush IS out of most of Diyala Province, northeast of Baghdad.
As a dozen bulldozers and graders roar in the background—building a new road for military traffic to the shrine city of Samarra—Saad Mirwah said his joint command has successfully checked the advance of IS since June, when it advanced from Syria and captured Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul. Several Iraqi divisions disintegrated during that offensive.
