T. Belman. We keep hearing how American forces must train the Iraqi Army even after all these years. Yet the ISIS ragtag group of volunteers and local Sunni need no training. Hmmm. Obviously ISIS is supported by the Gulf states and many other Sunni countries. The only people resisting them are the Americans and the Iranians, both in a half-hearted manner. America isn’t committed to really stopping them for fear of alienating the Sunni countries and Iran does not want to invade for fear of the Sunnis taking the fight into Iran. Anyways that’s the way I see it. Israel is also sitting on the fence not knowing if she would rather have ISIS on her borders or Iran’s proxies. Better to let them kill each other.
Ramadi, the provincial capital of western Iraqi Anbar, fell to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant Friday, May 15 after its inhabitants were put to mass flight. The town, 110 km west of Baghdad, controls the traffic on the Euphrates River. Small pockets of Iraqi troops are still stranded there after taking hundreds of casualties.
The jihadists are in mid-momentum of a fresh multi-pronged offensive, which they launched shortly after they lost Tikrit last month to the biggest counter-offensive they had faced since seizing large tracts of land in Iraq nearly a year ago.
This momentum has carried the Islamists across Anbar province which touches the Syrian and Jordanian borders to capture another key location – Jubba, next door to Iraq’s biggest air base at Al-Ansar. There, hundreds of US officers and soldiers are training Iraqi troops to fight ISIS and helping the Iraqi army manage the fighting in the province.
Parts of this base have already come under Islamist gun and mortar fire.
Not far from Ramadi, ISIS is threatening the oil-producing town of Baiji where a small Iraqi army force of no more than a few hundred soldiers is surrounded by the jihadists, with slim chances of holding out much longer before they are wiped out or forced to surrender.
Yet another ISIS arm is pushing east towards Baghdad, with the object of disabling the international airport by bringing its runways within mortar range.
To conquer Ramadi, ISIS used bulldozers to knock gaps in the sand earthworks built by the Iraqi army to defend the town, then sending half a dozen bomb cars through the gaps to the Iraqi military command centers where they detonated.
Some of those bomb cars were driven by Muslims from West Europe, who had traveled through Syria to join up with ISIS in Iraq. The jihadists named one of them as “Abu Musa al-Britani.”
Just Thursday, May 14, the British police revealed that more than 700 potential terror suspects had traveled to Syria from the U.K. to fight or support extremists, and about half are believed to have returned, primed for terrorist operations on home ground.
In response to the British police statement, ISIS released a video recording of a message delivered by its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi calling on supporters around the world to join the fight in Syria and Iraq or to “take up arms wherever they live.”
It was Baghdadi’s first message since a number of media reports said he was killed or critically injured, and was intended to refute claims that he was no longer in active charge of the group.
DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources outline the common operational tactic, modus operandi, employed by the Islamist group in all its Iraq offensives.
After singling out a targeted location, their fighters first seize control of its environs. That way, they can block off in advance any incoming and outgoing movements of Iraqi troops – whether in retreat or for bringing up reinforcements. Next, their fighters storm into the core of the targeted location. Fleeing Iraqi soldiers and their local allies and civilians are summarily put to death.
This new ISIS impetus in Iraq has wiped out the military advantages the Iran-backed Shiite militias and US air force gained from the capture of the central Iraqi town of Tikrit in late March and early April. When the Shiie mlitias turned on the local Sunni populace for murder, burning and looting, the Obama administration turned to Tehran and Baghdad and demanded those militias be removed from the city.
Since the Iraqi army is incapable of recovering control and holding Tikrit after the Islamists were driven out, the town has sunk into anarchy with innumerable armed gangs battling each other for control of its quarters, some of them ISIS loyalists.
In the current situation prevailing in western Iraq, the Americans and Iraqis might as well forget about their plans for retaking Iraq’s second city, Mosul, from ISIS control, this year.
@ yamit82:
Agreed. Its more accurate to say Iraq fell apart on religious and ethnic lines. You have Kurdistan, then the Sunni Arab regions now controlled by Islamic State and the Shiite Arab regions effectively under the sway of Iran.
The fall of Ramadi will probably accelerate the Kurdish desire to get out of Iraq in the near future.
There is no Iraqi state worth preserving. Iraq as a unified country is finished.
Iraq should have become 3 states instead of trying to keep the one. Then there would be less infighting and each smaller country would have citizen willing to fight for it.
There was no disintegration they never were an effective fighting force and no there is none to little motivation as Iraq in reality had no real national identity it was all clans tribes and religions which defined them and still does. most soldiers joined because it was a paying job in a country with few paying ones and very few good paying jobs at that. Stop believing American hype. America needed everyone to believe their nation building efforts were successful and that the expenditure of over a trillion dollars and thousands of dead and wounded were worth the price. Truth lies in the opposite direction.
Bush scammed the nation and now as that nutty preacher said: the “Chickens have come home to roost”!!!
Its not a training problem – its a morale problem and the Iraqi army or what’s left of it has disintegrated as an effective fighting force. The Islamic State has a ragtag army armed with low tech equipment but high on morale and fighting spirit. That’s made all the difference for them.
Numerical and technological superiority mean nothing against a lesser foe if he has the will to fight and win and you don’t have the motivation to defeat him. The Sunni Arabs in Iraq would rather take their chances with Islamic State than live under Iranian suzerainty.