Located 100 km west of Baghdad, Ramadi is the capital of the predominantly Sunni province of Al Anbar, Iraq’s largest city, which has borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Shortly after his announcement, the head of military operations in Anbar clarified that government forces had retaken only a strategic government complex.
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The governor of Anbar province, Sohaib Alrawi, said 80 percent of the city, which lies some 70 miles (112 kilometers) west of Baghdad, had been liberated.
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U.S. officials also congratulated the Iraqi security forces for what they described as “their continued success against ISIL in Ramadi”, using the abbreviation for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. Gen. Yahya Rasool in an article by The New York Times.
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Authorities gave no immediate death toll from the battle for the city. The government says most civilians were able to evacuate before it launched its assault.
“The liberation of the government complex will be the falling domino that leads to the fall of the rest of the districts”, said Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi expert who advises the government on Isis. “We can see that huge damage was caused in the city and I don’t think that basic services will return for a while, nor will security”, he said.
Islamic State, also known by the acronyms ISIS, ISIL or Daesh, swept through a third of Iraq in June 2014 and declared a “caliphate” to rule over all Muslims from territory in both Iraq and Syria, carrying out mass killings and imposing a draconian form of Islam.
“These gains attest to the growing confidence and capability of Iraqi forces who are fighting bravely against a ruthless adversary employing suicide bombers, snipers and improvised explosive devices”, he added.
Many of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s political rivals had questioned his strategy of excluding those groups and relying on the US-led coalition’s air power.
The remaining fighters fled the compound around midday on December 27 after being encircled by Iraqi counterterrorism forces, police and Sunni tribesmen, and supported by American airstrikes.
Pockets of jihadists may remain in parts of the city but the army said it had faced no resistance since IS fighters abandoned the flashpoint government complex on yesterday.
It’s possible that the Iraqi military’s achievement is a symbolic victory, she said, and what happens next is critical.
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The military and pro-government forces have slowly clawed back land, but the fight for Ramadi is the first major battle in which Iraq’s powerful Shiite militias have largely been excluded, because of concerns about their presence in the largely Sunni city.
