In this file photo taken Thursday, June 19, 2014, al-Qaeda-inspired militants stand with captured Iraqi army Humvee at a checkpoint outside an oil refinery in Beiji, some 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Baghdad, Iraq. The government forces on Friday, Nov. 14, drove Islamic State militants out from their remaining strongholds inside the oil refinery town of Beiji, two security officials said.Uncredited/The Associated Press
Iraqi forces drove Islamic State militants out of a strategic oil refinery town north of Baghdad on Friday, scoring their biggest battlefield victory since they melted away in the face of the terror group's stunning summer offensive that captured much of northern and western Iraq.
The apparent recapture of Beiji is the latest in a series of setbacks for the jihadi group, which has lost hundreds of fighters to airstrikes by a U.S.-led coalition in a stalled advance on the Syrian town of Kobani. On Friday, activists there reported significant progress by Kurdish fighters defending the town.
Iraqi security officials said government forces backed by allied militiamen took control of Beiji and also lifted a monthslong siege on its refinery – Iraq's largest – by the group calling itself Islamic State. However, two military officials reached by telephone in Beiji late Friday said there was still some fighting going on at the refinery, but reinforcements had been sent in and Iraqi forces were poised to retake it.
Beiji will now likely be a base for staging a push to take back Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit to the south, after government forces tried to retake it earlier this year. That campaign stalled and the city remains in the hands of Islamic State extremists.
In Geneva, meanwhile, a United Nations panel investigating war crimes by the Islamic State group said Syrians and Iraqis are subjected to a "rule of terror," with the calculated use of public brutality and indoctrination to ensure the submission of communities under its control.
It said the extremists have denied food and medicine to hundreds of thousands of people and hidden fighters among civilians since the start of the U.S.-led air campaign.
The conclusions from the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, a four-member panel of independent experts, are based on more than 300 interviews with people who fled or are living in areas controlled by the group and on video and photographic evidence.
"Those that fled consistently described being subjected to acts that terrorize and aim to silence the population," said Brazilian diplomat Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, who chairs the panel. He said whatever "services" the group provides to civilians are "always in the framework of this rule of terror," similar to criminal organizations that use such means to control populations.
Commission member Vitit Muntarbhorn told a news conference the report was meant to amplify the voices of victims, who describe executions, amputations, public lashings and the use of sexual slavery, child soldiers and widespread indoctrination.
The group has "become synonymous with extreme violence directed against civilians and captured fighters," the report said.
Humanitarian groups have been unable to reach almost 600,000 people living in two Syrian provinces under the group's control, according to the commission, and the group has obstructed the flow of medicine, doctors and nurses into a third province.
As it struggles to maintain momentum on the battlefield, the militant group has redoubled efforts to present itself as a new self-styled Islamic caliphate, with plans to launch its own currency in the parts of Syria and Iraq that are still under its control.
A website affiliated with the group said its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has ordered the minting of gold, silver and copper coins for a new currency. The authenticity of the posting could not be independently verified but the website has been used in the past for Islamic State postings.