Pushing back against criticism of a stalled war against the Islamic State, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Wednesday the United States is ready to deploy more military advisors to Iraq, along with attack helicopters, to push the fight forward.
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The US military says airstrikes over the past week have killed about 350 Islamic State fighters in the Iraqi city of Ramadi and that may have reduced by half the number of fighters defending the city.
US Secretary of Defence Ash Carter has called on coalition allies against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to send special operations forces to bolster fight against the armed group.
Carter said that during the past several months, the U.S.-led coalition fighting IS in Iraq and Syria has provided specialized training and equipment, including combat engineering assistance such as bulldozing, and munitions such as AT-4 shoulder-fired missiles to stop truck bombs, to the Iraqi army and counter-terrorism service units entering Ramadi neighborhoods from multiple directions.
The advance was hailed as a significant step in efforts to retake Ramadi, a key IS hub 100 kilometres (60 miles) west of Baghdad, and fragment the jihadists’ self-proclaimed “caliphate”.
Carter said that though there has been some success in the attempt to retake Ramadi in recent months, “there is still tough fighting ahead”.
“These attacks make it clear that ISIL’s threat against our homeland is real, direct, and growing, that we are not winning this war and that time is not on our side”, said Senator John McCain, the Republican chairman of the Senate committee, using an acronym for Islamic State.
He and other military sources said Iraqi forces had also retaken the Anbar Operations Command, a key facility which lies at a fork of the Euphrates River in the city.
But as Iraqi forces cemented their hold on the newly-recaptured Al-Tameem area, an ISIS suicide bomber killed at least eight people in Baghdad, illustrating the danger posed by the jihadists even far from the front lines.
Iraqi security forces take positions in Ramadi, Iraq, on December 2, 2015.
Iraq’s military seized a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city center and raised the Iraqi flag over a facility that once housed an Iraqi military operations center before it fell to the Islamic State in May.
Carter acknowledged that the “Sunni Arab combined force” discussed at a Camp David summit in the spring “has not materilized”, but suggested Sunni forces could work at “enabling local forces”.
Just a few weeks ago – hours before the November 13 Paris terror attacks – President Obama said that the terrorist group was contained.
“That has not materialized among them”, Carter said.
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The Iraqi armed forces also said they had carried out air strikes on various locations in Anbar province, making use of new hardware.
