Yet on Sunday, military officials in the city were reluctant to allow journalists to head back to Baghdad by road β even though the highway skirts Tikrit well to the west. Iraqi military escorts surmised that the person shooting had to have been within visual range β and probably to the west, although downtown was southeast. According to Iraqi military officials and fighters on the ground in Tikrit, ISIS still dominates or controls about 20 square miles of the city, everything from the edge of Tikrit University in the north, to the far end of the New Ouja neighborhood in the south, a distance as much as eight miles north to south.
That encompasses most of the populous parts of the city, which generally lie west of the Tigris River; all of its main downtown and business districts; the government quarter and the former palace of Saddam Hussein. Government forces remain mostly east of the Tigris, an area that is predominantly rural and agricultural, or on the suburban or rural outskirts of the city on the western and southern sides.
The army headquarters for the operation are situated at a campus building not far from the front line with ISIS β though here, front line is a relative term. Eight mortar tubes were set up around the headquarters to provide defense, and they were pointing not just south toward the center of Tikrit, but also to the north and northeast.
Those mortars were all fired relatively frequently Saturday and Sunday, their shots alternating with the ground-shaking blasts of bombs being dropped from time to time by coalition aircraft. He said the going had been slow because at first Iraqi forces wanted to leave space for civilians to flee the city, and then wanted to proceed in a way that kept casualties among the military and its allied Shiite militias as low as possible.
Despite weeks of fighting, he insisted that the pro-government forces had sustained few fatalities, and estimated that ISIS had to fighters left in the city, and had lost an equal number killed. Shiite militias were losing about an average of eight fighters a day killed, according to cemetery workers in Najaf, where most Shiite martyrs are buried. While that was a nationwide estimate, most of them would have been fighting in Salahuddin Province.
