Ten months after U.S. air strikes began, ISIS militants took
control of
Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province. The group launched an assault
on May 15 with the backing of sleeper cells to capture government facilities
and take control of most of the city just two days later, on May 17. Ramadi is
strategic to the Islamic State because of its proximity to Baghdad. The Islamic
State group’s seizure of Ramadi, was a painful blow to the US-led war against
the jihadists.
What happened in Ramadi was a failure of the Iraqi forces to
fight. Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said Sunday that Iraqi forces had
demonstrated “
no will to fight” against the ISIS, blaming them for a retreat
that led to the terrorist group’s victory in capturing the Iraqi city of
Ramadi. Al-Zamili, head of Iraq’s parliamentary defense and security committee,
dismissed Carter’s remarks as “unrealistic and baseless”. He said the US had
failed to provide “good equipment, weapons and aerial support” to the soldiers
and was seeking to “throw the blame on somebody else”. Maj Gen Tim Cross,
speaking to the BBC’s Today program, said: “Churchill said back at the beginning
of the 20th century, you can destroy an army very quickly, and effectively we
did that when we disbanded the Iraqi military back in 2003, but … it can take a
generation to build a strong capable military that is going to win this sort of
campaign.”
Mr. McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee,
repeated his call to send American ground troops, including Special Operations
forces, into Iraq. Mr. McCain
blamed President Obama on CBS’s “Face the Nation”
by saying: “We need to have a strategy.” He added, “There is no strategy. And
anybody that says that there is I’d like to hear what it is. Because it
certainly isn’t apparent now.”
