TIKRIT: Iraqi commanders were plotting a strategy for flushing out the few remaining Islamic State group fighters from central Tikrit, a city one commander said Saturday would be liberated within three days.

The massively outnumbered IS fighters are completely boxed in but are protected by snipers and thousands of bombs they planted across the city.

That has slowed the progress of the broad alliance of forces battling IS, which is keen to minimize casualties on the way to what would be the biggest victory yet against the IS.

Karim Al-Nuri, a top leader of the Badr militia and spokesman of the volunteer Popular Mobilization units, said it would take no more than “72 hours” to liberate Tikrit from IS, which seized it last summer.

The last defenders are holed up in the city center and “surrounded from all sides,” Nuri said.

Speaking to AFP from the outskirts of Tikrit, near the village of Awja, he said “their number is now 60 to 70.”

An lieutenant colonel in the army’s elite counter-terrorism was more conservative about the battle’s evolution, saying “battles in cities are difficult for all armies.”

AFP reporters in a northern neighborhood of Tikrit saw dozens of craters on a single street, caused by the explosion of bombs concealed underneath.

On a roof, a government marksman wearing a white head scarf and who gave his name as Haj Abu Maryam said that by noon, he had already killed two enemy snipers.

There was no evidence of intense fighting Saturday, after another day that saw IS pounded from above — with artillery, jets and gunships — but with the assault making little headway on the ground.

Troops, police, Popular Mobilization units, Shiite militias and Sunni fighters eager to retake their own city launched a huge assault nearly two weeks ago.

They first cleared outlying areas in Salaheddin province, of which Tikrit is the capital, and broke the city’s defenses on Wednesday.

Baghdad has failed several times in bids to retake Tikrit, but this operation is on a different scale, with up to 30,000 men initially involved.