ISIL now controls less than seven percent of Iraq, military says

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) now controls less than seven percent of Iraq, down from the 40 percent it held nearly three years ago, a military spokesman said April 11.

Iraqi forces backed by U.S.-led air strikes and other support are now battling ISIL inside second city Mosul, after retaking much of the other territory the jihadists had seized.

"Daesh controlled 40 percent of Iraqi land" in 2014, Brigadier General Yahya Rasool told reporters, using an Arabic acronym for ISIL, AFP reported.

"As of March 31 [this year], they only held 6.8 percent of Iraqi territory," said Rasool, the spokesman of the Joint Operations Command coordinating the anti-jihadist effort.

Various members of the forces, Iraqi and foreign, battling the jihadists have disagreed in the past on figures about control of territory, but ISIL has been losing ground steadily for close to two years.

The most brutal organization in modern jihad shocked the world when it took over Mosul in June 2014 and then swept across much of the country's Sunni Arab heartland.

Iraqi forces with the backing of the U.S.-led coalition - which has thousands of military personnel deployed in Iraq and carries out daily air strikes - launched a major offensive to retake Mosul in October 2016.

They retook control of the eastern side of the city, which is divided by the Tigris River, in January and have since mid-February been battling die-hard jihadists holed up in their last west Mosul redoubts.

(HH) Half of Iraqi families at risk of hunger after years of war, says UN
More than half of Iraqi families are at risk of going hungry, a U.N. agency said on April 10, warning of "unprecedented levels of vulnerability" faced by the population...