BAGHDAD
— The last Iraqi security forces fled Ramadi on Sunday, as the city
fell completely to the militants of the Islamic State, who ransacked the
provincial military headquarters, seizing a large store of weapons, and
killed people loyal to the government, according to security officials
and tribal leaders.
The fall of Ramadi, despite intensified American airstrikes
in recent weeks in a bid to save the city, represented the biggest
victory so far this year for the Islamic State, which has declared a
caliphate, or Islamic state, in the vast areas of Syria and Iraq that it controls. The defeat also laid bare the failed strategy of the Iraqi government, which had announced last month a new offensive to retake Anbar Province, a large desert region in the west of which Ramadi is the capital.
“The city has fallen,” said Muhannad Haimour, the spokesman for Anbar’s
governor. Mr. Haimour said that at least 500 civilians and security
personnel had been killed over the last two days in and around Ramadi,
either from fighting or executions. Among the dead, he said, was the
3-year-old daughter of a soldier.
“Men,
women, kids and fighters’ bodies are scattered on the ground,” said
Sheikh Rafi al-Fahdawi, a tribal leader from Ramadi, who was in Baghdad
on Sunday and whose men had been resisting the Islamic State, also known
as ISIS or ISIL.
He also said, “All security forces and tribal leaders have either retreated or been killed in battle. It is a big loss.”
Ramadi
fell a day after the Pentagon said Special Operations forces, flying in
helicopters that took off from Iraq, carried out a raid in eastern
Syria that resulted in the death of an Islamic State leader and the capture of his wife, along with the recovery of a trove of materials American officials hope will yield important intelligence on the group.
American
officials said recently that the Islamic State was on the defensive in
Iraq, noting that the group had lost territory in Salahuddin Province
and in some other areas in northern Iraq near the border with the
autonomous Kurdish region. Yet the fall of Ramadi shows that the group
is still capable of carrying out effective offensive operations.
Anbar
Province holds painful historical import for the United States as the
place where nearly 1,300 Marines and soldiers died after the
American-led invasion of 2003. Since the beginning of 2014, months
before the fall of Mosul
and the start of the American air campaign against the Islamic State,
the United States has been working with the Iraqi government to drive
the extremist group from Anbar, sending vast supplies of weapons and
ammunition and, more recently, training Sunni tribal fighters at an air
base in the province.
With
defeat looming in Ramadi on Sunday afternoon, the Anbar Provincial
Council met in Baghdad and voted to ask Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi
to send Shiite fighters to rescue Anbar, a largely Sunni province. In
response, Mr. Abadi issued a statement calling for the militias, known
as the Popular Mobilization Forces and including several powerful Shiite
forces supported by Iran, to be ready to fight. Some of the Shiite
irregular units, which were formed last summer after Shiite clerics put
out a call to arms, are more firmly under the command of the government,
while others answer to Iran.
The
involvement of the militias in Anbar had been opposed by the United
States, which leads an international coalition that has been carrying
out airstrikes in support of Iraqi forces. American officials had
worried that the militias could inflame sectarian tensions in the
province and ultimately make it harder to pacify.
As
they considered asking for the militias’ assistance, Anbar officials
met over the weekend with the American ambassador to Iraq, Stuart E.
Jones, to ascertain the United States’ position on the issue. According
to officials, Mr. Jones told the Anbar delegation that the United States
would continue its air campaign, provided that the militias were under
the command of Mr. Abadi, and not Iranian advisers, and that the
militias were properly organized to avoid American bombing runs.
At
the outset of an offensive to liberate Tikrit, in Salahuddin Province,
in March, the Iranian-backed militias took the lead, and American
warplanes stayed away. Once those militias stalled, Mr. Abadi ordered
them to retreat, which was followed by airstrikes by the United States, an advance by Iraqi security forces, and the liberation of Tikrit.
In
the wake of that victory, Mr. Abadi promised a new effort in Anbar, a
campaign to be led by the Iraqi security forces and supported by
American airstrikes, with Iranian-backed militias on the sidelines. A
crucial component of that strategy was to arm local Sunni tribesmen to
fight, but that plan never materialized on a large-scale, partly because
of resistance by powerful Shiite political leaders in Baghdad.
The
deterioration of Anbar over the past month underscored the
ineffectiveness of the Iraqi Army, which is being trained by American
military advisers, and raised questions about the United States’
strategy to defeat the Islamic State. At the same time, now that the
militias are being called upon, the collapse of Ramadi has demonstrated
again the influence of Iran, even if its advisers are unlikely to be on
the ground in Anbar, as they were during the operation in Tikrit.
The
Islamic State, which has held areas around Ramadi for nearly a year and
a half, began an offensive on the city late Thursday night, and on
Friday afternoon captured the provincial government headquarters.
Mr.
Abadi on Friday promised to send reinforcements, but only about 200
soldiers arrived from Baghdad to help resist in one of the last
contested neighborhoods in the city, according to a security official in
Anbar.
American
officials in Washington played down the situation Friday, saying it was
similar to the up-and-down fighting there since the beginning of last
year.
Yet
the Islamic State was able to consolidate its hold of the city over the
weekend, and on Sunday seized one of the last government redoubts, the
local operations command center. The remaining officers and soldiers had
fled, and one of them reached by telephone Sunday afternoon said they
were stuck in a convoy southwest of Ramadi, with Islamic State militants
closing in from four sides.
Another
soldier who had been stationed at the Anbar Operations Command
headquarters said the forces had left behind a huge cache of weapons
recently sent by Baghdad, including rocket-propelled grenades and heavy
machine guns. The weapons had been supplied by both the United States
and Russia.
“ISIS
is gaining more weapons, and the battle will be harder in the future,”
said the soldier, who declined to give his name because he feared for
his life.
Shiite militia leaders, who had mostly watched the collapse from afar, were scrambling on Sunday to mobilize their men.
Mueen
al-Kadhumi, a leader in the Popular Mobilization Forces and a member of
the Badr Organization, a longstanding militia with ties to Iran, said,
“We have recalled all off-duty fighters to join their units as soon as
possible to participate in the upcoming battle for Anbar.”
Pentagon officials said Sunday that it was premature to declare that Ramadi had fallen.
“We’re
continuing to monitor reports of tough fighting in Ramadi, and the
situation remains fluid and contested,” said Col. Steven H. Warren, a
Defense Department spokesman.
Coalition
warplanes carried out more attacks on Islamic State targets in Iraq,
with seven airstrikes on militant positions in or near Ramadi over the
weekend, according to official statements. But the advance by Islamic
State fighters was evidence again that American air power alone could
not hold territory for the Baghdad government, or dislodge the
militants, without an effective Iraqi force on the ground.
The
wife of the Islamic State’s senior financial officer remained in
American custody in Iraq on Sunday. Umm Sayyaf was captured during the
Saturday raid into Syria that killed her husband, Abu Sayyaf, and about a
dozen militant fighters.
A
senior American official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to
discuss the investigation, said Abu Sayyaf’s death was likely to cause
only a minor disruption in the Islamic State’s financial operations,
including black-market sales of oil petroleum products.
“This will be short-lived,” the official said. “Organizations like this are designed to have succession plans.”[source]
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