Iraqi army retakes Rawa, the last Daesh-held town in the country

Iraqi forces backed by the US-led coalition retook on Friday the last town in the country that was held by Daesh, the defence ministry's spokesman said.

The recapture of Rawa comes more than three years after Daesh stormed nearly a third of Iraqi territory.

At dawn on Friday, Iraqi military units and local fighters pushed into the western neighbourhoods of Rawa in western Anbar province and after just five hours of fighting, Iraqi forces retook the town, Brigadier General Yahya Rasool said.

Rawa is 275 kilometres northwest of Baghdad. It lies along the Euphrates River valley near the border town of Qaim that Iraqi forces retook from Daesh earlier this month.

US-led coalition forces supported the operations to retake Rawa and Qaim with intelligence, air strikes and advisers, coalition spokesman Ryan Dillon said.

TRT World speaks to journalist Ammar Karim in Baghdad.

Daesh swept across Iraq's north and west in the summer of 2014, capturing Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, and advancing to the edges of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

Later that year the US began a campaign of air strikes against the militants that fueled Iraqi territorial gains, allowing the military to retake Mosul in July of this year.

All that now remains of Daesh-held territory in Iraq are patches of rural territory in the country's vast western desert along the border with Syria.

Daesh has steadily been losing ground across the border in Syria as well where its so-called 'caliphate' has basically crumbled with the loss of the city of Raqqa, Daesh's de facto Syrian capital.

Raqqa fell to YPG-dominated US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces in October.