In two separate telegraph messages to Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and President Fuad Masum on Friday, the Qatari emir expressed his country’s solidarity with the Republic of Iraq in the fight against terrorist groups.
He also pledged Qatar’s continued supports for regional and international campaigns aimed to uproot terrorism, according to the RT Arabic.
After eight months of difficult urban warfare, Iraqi military forces on Thursday captured the Mosul mosque at the heart of the northern city, which Daesh had declared its de facto capital.
Abadi said the liberation of the site of the symbolic al-Nuri Mosque in Old Mosul is “the declaration of the end of the statelet of Daesh.”
Iraqi authorities expect the long battle for Mosul to end in coming days as remaining Daesh militants are bottled up in just a handful of neighborhoods of the Old City.
Daesh stronghold in Syria’s Raqqa is also close to falling.
Daesh militants made swift advances in northern and western Iraq over the summer of 2014, after capturing swaths of northern Syria.
Afterwards, a combination of concentrated attacks by the Iraqi military and the volunteer forces, who rushed to take arms after Ayatollah Sistani issued a fatwa calling for the fight against the militants, blunted the edge of Daesh offensive and forced the terrorist group withdraw from much of the areas it had occupied.