The U.S. military during a Pentagon press briefing last week unveiled a document that officials say shows ISIS instructing its fighters to commit atrocities while posing as Iraqi soldiers before fleeing the city of Fallujah. Gen. Yahya Rasool initially announced that Ramadi had been “grabbed from the hateful claws” of the Islamic State group and “fully liberated”.
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Abadi arrived by helicopter in the battle-scarred city, which lies around 100 kilometres (60 miles) west of Baghdad and is the capital of the province of Anbar. He said at its peak there were up to 1,000 IS fighters in Ramadi, and that only 150-250 remain. The government says most civilians were able to evacuate before it launched its assault. “We are coming to liberate Mosul and it will be the fatal and final blow to IS”, he said in speech praising the army’s “victory” in Ramadi.
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“By controlling the complex this means that we have defeated them in Ramadi”, Sabah al-Numani, a spokesman for the force leading the fight on the government side, said in an interview with Reuters. It is not clear how many were killed and how many were able to pull back to positions outside the city. “?Now it’s important for the Iraqi government, working with provincial and local authorities, to seize this opportunity to maintain the peace in Ramadi, prevent the return of ISIL and other extremists, and facilitate the return of Ramadi’s citizens back to the city”, he added.
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Iraqi state TV was replaying Monday’s footage from Ramadi, showing troops, some waving Iraqi flags and others brandishing machine guns, chanting and dancing inside what it described as the government complex in central Ramadi. The government sidelined the PMF in the Ramadi battle to ensure air support from the United States which is reluctant to be seen fighting on the same side as the militias. It also marked a critical test for Iraqi troops, as they’ll likely be called on to do it again in the fight for Mosul, a city also bisected by the Euphrates River. Distrust of the Shiite-led government runs deep in the sprawling Anbar province, which is overwhelmingly Sunni. Abadi’s predecessor, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, thoroughly alienated the Sunni community, helping to fuel the insurgency that became the IS. That is the absence of a moderate Sunni political alternative or cohesive fighting force in either Iraq or Syria.
“Most of these fighters fought al-Qaida in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, they know their areas very well and the whereabouts of the local Daesh fighters and their movements”, he said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.
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But General 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. American officials said the US-led coalition backing Iraqi forces had carried out more than 630 air strikes in the area over the past six months and provided training and equipment. Even if Iraq drives the extremists out, they would retain their grip on large parts of Syria, where an increasingly complex civil war has sucked in regional powers and left the US with few reliable allies.
