BAGHDAD — Iraqi Army forces and Shiite militia fighters on Tuesday pressed their assault on the city of Tikrit, seeking to encircle Islamic State strongholds on the second day of the government’s largest offensive yet against the militant group that has seized large portions of Iraqi territory.
By afternoon, military officials said, government forces had reached the outskirts of Al Dour, just south of Tikrit, and were advancing slowly after freeing 13 police officers held there by Islamic State fighters.
Images from Iraqi news channels showed convoys of armored vehicles crossing the flat yellow expanse of Salahuddin Province and government fighters firing heavy machine guns from behind cinder block walls in an area of low-slung houses. The scenes were interspersed with patriotic appeals to Iraqis to join the Army or the militias, which are known as “popular mobilization” forces.
The operation to retake Tikrit, the birthplace of the former ruler Saddam Hussein, is seen as a testing ground for Iraqi forces in preparation for an assault on Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, which the Islamic State seized nearly nine months ago along with parts of northern and western Iraq.
The Tikrit offensive could either prove to be a first step toward driving back the Islamic State or it could deepen longstanding sectarian and political divides that the militants have exploited to win support from some Iraqi Sunnis and acquiescence from others. The group has also employed brutal intimidation tactics against Sunnis who reject it or support the government in Baghdad.
But at the same time, Shiite militias have been accused of reprisals and atrocities against the Sunni population, many of whom regard them with suspicion and fear.
The Tikrit operation carries emotional weight for Iraqis, as the first attempt to seize the area since last June, when Islamic State militants massacred more than 1,000 Iraqi Shiite soldiers as they fled a nearby military base, Camp Speicher. There have been fears that Shiite militia members from the same areas that many of the soldiers hailed from could take revenge on local Sunnis if they enter Tikrit, and some militia leaders have openly referred to the assault as a revenge operation, potentially complicating efforts to recruit Sunnis.
Tikrit has additional symbolic resonance as one of the last cities to fall in the United States invasion in 2003. Even as American troops there used Mr. Hussein’s palace as a base, the city and the surrounding Salahuddin Province became a fulcrum of the insurgency against the United States occupation. Camp Speicher, originally a United States base, is named for one of the Americans killed by insurgents.
Islamic State supporters have been circulating a report online that an American member of the group blew himself up on Monday in a suicide truck bombing on the outskirts of the nearby city of Samarra, the jumping-off point for the Iraqi assault on Tikrit.
According to SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks militant movements online, the message referred to the bomber only as Abu Dawoud al-Amriki and said that he had killed dozens of Shiites, referring to them with slurs against the sect. Iraqi military officials confirmed there had been a truck bombing in Samarra on Monday and said it had killed three militia volunteers and wounded 12, with no information about the bomber’s identity.
Additional forces were awaiting orders to advance toward Tikrit from the west, the officials said, backed by Iraqi jets and helicopters and reportedly by top-level Iranian commanders, but not, so far, by United States warplanes, unlike in previous operations. Reuters reported that the Iranian spymaster Qassim Suleimani was seen near the front lines with Hadi al-Ameri, an Iraqi militia leader and politician who has long headed the Badr Organization, one of Iraq’s main Shiite militias, and now oversees the popular mobilization units.
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