Iraqi troops drop weapons and flee as ISIS takes Ramadi

Ramadi, a crucial city in the Anbar province and a strategic part of the gateway to Baghdad

Even as U.S. Special Forces had just taken out a major ISIS commander in Syria, the people of Ramadi have now become the latest witnesses to what happens when the United States fights a battle in a half-hearted manner. We lose, and when the enemy is a sadistic group of monsters like ISIS, our allies pay a horrifically high price.

Reports overnight are that Ramadi, a crucial city in the Anbar province and a strategic part of the gateway to Baghdad, has now fallen to ISIS:

Muhannad Haimour, a spokesman for the provincial governor of Anbar, said Monday that around 500 civilians and Iraqi soldiers are estimated to have been killed over the last few days, while approximately 8,000 had fled the city. He said the figure is in addition to the enormous exodus in April, when the U.N. said as many as 114,000 residents fled from Ramadi and surrounding villages at the height of the violence.

“Ramadi has fallen,” Haimour had told AP Sunday. “The city was completely taken. ... The military is fleeing.”

also people that love to fight have probably run off and joined isis while guys just looking for a gubmint paycheck join up with the Iraqi army. if you lack a warrior spirit you are useless in a battle. worse your are a liability

Michael: Maybe. But it occurred to me, the soldiers are paid to fight; the rebels aren't.
Hyman Roth: What does that tell you?
Michael: They can win.

if you lack a warrior spirit you are useless in a battle. worse your are a liability

Iraqis have a warrior spirit, and that's the problem. Warriors are opportunists - they fight for loot, women and land. Soldiers fight for pay, and they are drilled to think of retreat as dishonorable and (counter-intuitively, to most non-ISIS Arabs) being worse than death. This probably has to do with the fact that many warriors are part-timers for whom war is just one of many things they do to feed their families, whereas soldiers are professionals for whom war is a calling. This was why Roman soldiery kept brushing aside farmer-warriors from neighboring regions until they began funding and training professional soldiers of their own.

If past stories about corruption in military formations apply in Iraq's case, the odds are that significant numbers of Iraqi soldiers exist only on paper - to draw salaries and money for supplies for the officers who made up those names. And where actual personnel are present, they are short on supplies because their superiors took the money and used it to pad their bank accounts. And the likelihood is that very little realistic training occurred - because ammunition costs money. And in many cases, many of the "soldiers", where the names represent real people, are civilians who never showed up for work.

The Kurds are supposed to be a cut above. I saw a training video that showed recruits jumping through burning metal hoops. I figured there and then that it was a shambolic mess. And I was right - ISIS rolled right over them until coalition aircraft showed up.

It’s been shown that a lot of the leaders of Isis are former Baathist from Iraq. It explains their brutality and why the Iraqi army flee from them. However, it still makes them cowards. They drop weapons and flee leaving women and children behind to be slaughtered and worse.

I wish there was a way to save the Christians from over there and then nuke the rest. But I have no idea how we could do that.

I agree with what you are saying but when I referred to warriors I wasn’t thinking “barbarians” which is kind of what you are describing when you spoke of the romans pushing aside farmer-warriors. when I referred to warrior spirit, I was talking about the “warrior ethos” of a professional soldier. if you lack that professional mentality you are nothing more than a barbarian (like youre saying)....I think we are saying the same thing

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