According to Pentagon officials, a series of heavy U.S. airstrikes against Ramadi, the capital of the Iraqi Anbar Province, have killed at least 350 ISIS fighters in the past week.
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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.
The fall of Ramadi was the biggest blow to Iraqi forces since IS captured Iraq’s second largest city of Mosul in the summer of 2014.
He added that the Pentagon would assist the Iraqi army “with additional unique capabilities to help them finish the job, including attack helicopters and accompanying advisors, if requested by Prime Minister Abadi”.
The United States is prepared to supply the Iraqi army with attack helicopters and advisors to help it retake the city of Ramadi from the Islamic State group, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Wednesday.
Carter outlined the steps as the administration faces criticism from Congress about its strategy to defeat the IS militants, reflecting a nation’s growing fears about the threat of terrorism.
US officials have frequently expressed frustration with how long it has taken the Iraqi army and other security forces to press an offensive in Ramadi, but in recent days, they have pointed to important battlefield progress.
Iraqi security forces and Shi’ite fighters chant slogans as they gather at Udhaim dam, north of Baghdad March 1, 2015. “They are not giants”, he said, doubting that “air power alone” can remove the Islamic State from the vast swaths of land it now controls across northern and western Iraq.
This is the latest in the ongoing and escalating push against ISIS. already, we have thousands of troops on the ground in Iraq as advisers but they are supposed to be in non-combat training roles.
Carter defended the administration’s decision not to deploy a heavy US ground force to drive IS from Syrian and Iraqi territory.
While Carter agreed that Arab states should do more, he was adamant that the United States had to be careful not to “Americanize” the fight against ISIS.
Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said deploying a significant force of USA troops to the region would be counterproductive.
“It is the poorest and most vulnerable who are trapped because they did not have the means to leave earlier”, UNHCR representative Bruno Geddo told VOA via telephone from Baghdad.
That’s the right approach, he said, for three reasons: It takes the fight to the enemy; it seeks to develop capable, motivated, local ground forces to can assure a lasting victory, and it sets conditions for a political solution to the civil war in Syria and inclusive governance in Iraq.
Brett McGurk, US President Barack Obama’s special envoy for the worldwide anti-IS coalition, …
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Carter slammed Russian Federation for attacking “opposition forces” instead of Daesh and urged Moscow to correct its course.
