Last Tuesday, Iraqi troops made a concerted effort to retake Ramadi, which is around 60 miles west of Baghdad.
The city fell to Islamic State back in May when, according to Ash Carter’s assessment [4] anyway, the army showed no will to fight in the face of the advancing ISIS hordes. Once the army, with the help of Sunni tribal fighters, retook a strategic command center they began to advance on a government complex where, according to sources, some 100 militants were dug in.
Despite sniper fire, suicide bombers, and IEDs the Iraqis were able to capture the government complex, marking the latest in a string of strategic and psychological victories for Baghdad’s much maligned forces.
Ramadi has been “fully liberated,” Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool said on Monday. Here's the statement from the Joint Operations Command:
“Yes, Ramadi city has been liberated and security forces, like the heroes of the counter terrorism forces, flew the Iraqi flag over the government compound building in Anbar. The flag is flying now to write a new history, and with the grace of God, the rest of the cities will be liberated.”
As you can see from the map shown above however, merely retaking the government complex doesn’t mean the city is an “ISIS-free zone” (to use the ridiculous term the US and Turkey made up [5] for the area north of Aleppo and West of the Euphrates in Syria). "Operations continued Monday to clear remaining Islamic State militants from other areas of Ramadi, security officials said, particularly in the eastern suburbs where many of the group’s holdouts had fled the day before as Iraqi forces advanced," WSJ notes [6].
“Gen. Ismail al-Mahlawi, head of military operations in Anbar, quickly clarified that government forces had only retaken a strategic government complex and that parts of the city remained under IS control,” AP writes [7], adding that although “IS fighters have retreated from about 70 percent of city, [they] still control the rest and government forces still don't fully control many of the districts from which the IS fighters have retreated.”
Right. And it’s unlikely that they’ll ever regain “full control” of the city where “ever” means sometime in the foreseeable future. There’s been talk of stationing the Sunni tribesmen in captured areas to ensure “the terrorists” don’t come back. Ramadi is Iraq’s Sunni heartland and thus Abadi isn’t keen on enlisting the assistance of Iran’s Shiite militias either to help with the fight or to occupy the city once it finally is fully liberated.
In short, Iraq doesn’t want the city to descend into sectarian violence in the wake of the ISIS withdrawal, but the Sunni fighters are undertrained and ill-equipped which leads one to question how effective they’ll ultimately be when it comes to defending captured ground.
In any event, here are some images which depict the aftermath of the latest fighting and should give you a good idea of what the Iraqis found when they entered the city which The Daily Mail says [8] has been wrenched from the "Devil's grasp":
So there you have it. A smoldering pile of rubble is 70% of the way "liberated." Hallelujah.
Don't forget that the scenes shown above are from a city that is just an hour by car from the capital of a country the US supposedly "saved" from a bleak future under a brutal dictator more than a decade ago. This, we suppose, is what a thriving democracy looks 12 years after a US intervention.
Next on the list is Mosul. In light of the following image which appeared in a piece of ISIS propaganda released earlier this year, we're interested to see what the city actually looks like now that the group has been in control for some 18 months...
