By Xinhua
Baghdad : Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced Friday that his troops are moving for a “decisive” final offensive against al-Qaida’s last stronghold in the northern city of Mosul.
Maliki’s announcement came two days after a massive bombing of a building in central Mosul left 36 people killed and more than 200 others wounded.
“Today our troops started moving to Mosul, and the battle there will be decisive,” Maliki said during an address in the holy city of Karbala, some 110 km south of Baghdad.
“We have set an operations room in Nineveh province to command the final battle there with al-Qaida and other insurgents, including the members of the previous regime,” Maliki said in a televised speech aired on the official Iraqia television.
U.S. and Iraqi troops have launched several offensives against al-Qaida and other insurgent groups in the past few months that pushed the guerrillas to Mosul, Iraq’s third main city and capital of Nineveh province, and some other areas in the country’s north.
“Our troops have defeated al-Qaida, now there is only Nineveh province and Kirkuk, where they escaped,” Maliki said.
On Wednesday, insurgents blew up an abandoned building in the Zanjili old neighborhood in Mosul City, killing up to 36 people and wounding more than 200 others.
The huge blast also demolished dozens of houses nearby.
One Thursday, a suicide bomber killed Brigadier-General Salih Mohammed Hasan al-Jubouri, police chief of the province when he was on a tour to inspect the devastated neighborhood from the previous day’s blast.