The War in Iraq was an armed conflict between Iraq and its allies and the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) which began in 2013 and ended in December 2017. Following December 2013, the insurgency escalated into full-scale guerrilla warfare following clashes in the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah in parts of western Iraq, and culminated in the Islamic State offensive into Iraq in June 2014, which lead to the capture of the cities of Mosul, Tikrit and other cities in western and northern Iraq by the Islamic State. Between 4–9 June 2014, the city of Mosul was attacked and later fell; following this, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called for a national state of emergency on 10 June. However, despite the security crisis, Iraq's parliament did not allow Maliki to declare a state of emergency; many legislators boycotted the session because they opposed expanding the prime minister's powers. Ali Ghaidan, a former military commander in Mosul, accused al-Maliki of being the one who issued the order to withdraw from the city of Mosul. At its height, ISIL held 56,000 square kilometers of Iraqi territory, containing 4.5 million citizens. The war resulted in the forced resignation of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in 2014, as well as an airstrike campaign by the United States and a dozen other countries to back Iraq, participation of American and Canadian troops (predominantly special forces) in ground combat operations, a $3.5 billion U.S.-led program to rearm the Iraqi Security Forces, a U.S.-led training program that provided training to nearly 200,000 Iraqi soldiers and police, the participation of Iranian troops including armored and air elements, and military and logistical aid provided to Iraq by Russia. On 9 December 2017, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced victory over ISIS, though others warned that they expected ISIS to fight on via an insurgency, and by other means. ISIL switched to guerrilla "hit and run" tactics in an effort to undermine the Iraqi government's effort to eradicate them. This conflict is interpreted by some in Iraq as a spillover of the Syrian Civil War. Other Iraqis and observers see it mainly as a culmination of long-running local sectarianism, exacerbated by the 2003 to 2011 Iraq War, the subsequent increase in anti-Sunni sectarianism under former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and the ensuing bloody crack-down on the 2012–2013 Sunni protests. Belligerents The Iraqi Armed Forces, Kurdish Peshmerga and various Turkmen