U.S. presses Iraqi army to get on with Ramadi offensive

Jim Michaels | USA TODAY

Sounding a new note of urgency, the U.S.-led coalition combating the Islamic State is pressing Iraq’s armed forces to launch a final assault to recapture the key city of Ramadi, a campaign entering its sixth month with only limited progress.

“It's time for the Iraqis to … make this final move,” said Col. Steve Warren, the coalition military spokesman in Iraq.

The remarks reflect a change in the Pentagon's public comments about the offensive. Pentagon officials had earlier said the offensive had not stalled and emphasized the complexity of the battle. But now that the Pentagon has provided the assistance Iraq's armed forces had requested to retake the city, it is stepping up pressure on Iraq to move ahead against the militants holed up in the city, 80 miles west of Baghdad.

Warren said the coalition has provided enough air power, training and other support to launch a successful offensive against the heavily outnumbered Islamic State fighters, who seized the city in May. “All the pieces are in place,” Warren said.

The pressure from the U.S. military comes as the Islamic State has pressed attacks around the world, including Friday's terror attacks in Paris, twin bombings in Beirut on Nov. 12 and the downing of a Russian airliner over Egypt on Oct. 31. The extremist group claimed it was behind all incidents, which caused nearly 400 deaths overall.

Since those attacks, France and Russia have stepped up bombing raids on Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Syria, but the militants do not appear to have suffered significant casualties, highlighting the limited impact of airstrikes that are not backed up by ground forces.

The prolonged battle for Ramadi underscores the need for an effective force of combat troops, which the Iraqi military is struggling to field. The U.S. strategy is to rely on local forces in Iraq and Syria because President Obama has ruled out sending U.S. troops for ground combat.

The coalition has backed up Iraq's military with more than 190 strikes along the Euphrates River Valley, which includes Ramadi, over the past month. The U.S. military also has provided training and equipment to breach minefields around the city.

A force of about 10,000 Iraqi troops has surrounded Ramadi and has closed in on the city center. An estimated 600 to 1,000 militants are inside the city, where they have established elaborate defenses using roadside bombs and other obstacles.

Iraqi forces have met stiff resistance as they tried to breach the defenses despite their numerical advantage. “When that point to that spear gets blunted against some stiff resistance, it could ... stop all the rest,” Warren said. “That's the case here.”

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has made the recapture of Ramadi a key part of the U.S. strategy to defeat the Islamic State. But dependence on Iraq's military is proving challenging. The armed forces collapsed when the militants swept into Iraq from Syria last year, and have been slow to recover.

Much of the military success against the extremist group since then has been achieved by Kurdish forces in northern Iraq and, to a lesser degree, by Shiite militias, two groups that have so far displayed a greater willingness to fight. This month, Kurdish forces aided by coalition airstrikes pushed the militants out of Sinjar in northern Iraq and cut a major Islamic State supply line linking Syria and Iraq.

Capturing a much larger city like Ramadi requires the country’s armed forces because they have the firepower needed for such an ambitious campaign.

Iraq’s forces, however, have been weakened by conflicts among Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis in the country, which has resulted in a military of competing interests and has undermined loyalty toward the Shiite-dominated central government.

The result is a fighting force with low morale, said Ben Connable, a senior analyst at RAND Corp. and a retired Marine Corps intelligence officer. “War is a contest of two opposing sides and one side doesn’t have a will.”