Top US officer in Baghdad as Iraq fights for Tikrit

The top US military officer vowed in Baghdad on Monday that the Islamic State group will be defeated, as Iraqi forces pressed their largest operation yet against the jihadists.

Some 30,000 men have been involved in a week-old operation to recapture Tikrit, one of the jihadists’ main hubs since they overran large parts of Iraq nine months ago.

But in a sign of the brutal lengths to which IS will go to maintain control, the group executed 20 men in Iraq’s northern province of Kirkuk and strung up more than a dozen of their victims’ bodies in public. 

General Martin Dempsey’s visit also coincided with the start of an offensive by Kurdish peshmerga forces in Kirkuk that further increases the pressure on the last IS strongholds east of the Tigris river.