Iraqi troops enter Fallujah

Latest: Iraqi forces entered the Daesh (IS) group bastion of Fallujah from three directions on Monday in a new phase of the operation to recapture the city, commanders said.

"Iraqi forces entered Fallujah under air cover from the international coalition, the Iraqi air force and army aviation and supported by artillery and tanks, said Lieutenant General Abdelwahab al-Saadi, the commander in charge of the operation.

"Counter-terrorism service (CTS) forces, the Anbar police and the Iraqi army, at around 4 am (0100 GMT), started moving into Fallujah from three directions," he said.

Elite Iraqi troops were poised to assault one of the Daesh (IS) group's most emblematic bastions, Fallujah, as thousands of civilians have fled the fighting.

Meanwhile, the Syrian opposition's chief negotiator Mohammed Alloush announced his resignation Sunday, citing the failure of UN-brokered peace talks and the continued shelling of rebel-held areas by President Bashar Al Assad's regime.

"The three rounds of talks were unsuccessful because of the stubbornness of the regime and its continued bombardments and aggressions towards the Syrian people," Alloush said in a statement on Twitter.

He also accused the international community of not doing enough to ease the suffering of the Syrian people.

Fighting in Syria and Iraq has prompted a new exodus of thousands of desperate civilians and deep concern for the many more trapped in the battlegrounds.

In Iraq, the overall commander of the Fallujah operation, Abdelwahab al-Saadi, has said it was a matter of hours before the Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) entered the city.

The week-old operation has so far focused on retaking villages and rural areas around Fallujah, which lies just 50 kilometres (30 miles) west of Baghdad.

"I won't tell you hours but the breach of Fallujah will happen very soon," Hadi al-Ameri, a senior commander in the Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary force, told Iraqi television Saturday.

Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region on Sunday announced the launch of a pre-dawn offensive involving 5,500 peshmerga fighters to retake an area on the road between its capital Arbil and Mosul.

Ten hours into the operation, which was launched a day after a wave of 12 coalition air strikes in the area, Kurdish forces had fully retaken three villages, it said.

In Syria, Kurdish rebels from the People's Protection Units (YPG) allied to Arab fighters and backed both on the ground and in the air by the US-led coalition, were targeting Raqa, IS's de-facto Syrian capital.

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