Posted on 05/17/2015 8:20:48 AM PDT by kristinn
Islamic State militants overran one of the last remaining districts held by government forces in the Iraqi city of Ramadi on Sunday and besieged a key army base on the edge of the western provincial capital, security sources said.
The militants seized most of Ramadi on Friday, planting their black flag on the local government headquarters in the center of the city, but a contingent of Iraqi special forces was holding out in the Malaab neighborhood.
Those forces retreated on Sunday to an area east of the city after suffering heavy casualties, security sources said, bringing Ramadi to the brink of falling to Islamic State.
It would be the first major urban center to be seized by the insurgents in Iraq since security forces and paramilitary groups began pushing them back last year.
Anbar provincial council member Athal Fahdawi described the situation in Ramadi as "total collapse" and said local officials had voted in favor of the deployment of Shi'ite paramilitaries to the Sunni heartland.
Shi'ite paramilitaries have played a leading role in reversing Islamic State gains elsewhere in Iraq, but have so far been kept on the sidelines in Anbar due to concerns about inflaming sectarian violence.
The insurgents were closing in on the Anbar Operations Command to the west and a military officer inside the army base said it was too late to send reinforcements, pleading for help from Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.
“We are now surrounded inside the Operations Command by Daesh, and mortars are raining down," said the officer. Daesh is an Arabic acronym for Islamic State.
"Daesh fighters are in almost every street. It’s a chaotic situation and things are sliding out of control. Ramadi is falling into the hands of Daesh," the officer said.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
No surprise here...just breaks my heart & ticks me off that our young men & women gave life & limb to this crap hole of a country.
All is well in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen! In further news the U.S. economy is booming.
This was expected. The kenyan refused to provide more support to Iraq a while back. Supposedly to focus on protecting oil facilities instead of cities.
Undocumented Demoncrat McCain
and the undocumented Indonesian Marxist
must be high five-ing their corrupt evil achievement today.
Slavery, rape, crucifixion ... all caused by THEM.
Wasn’t this a Saddam supporters stronghold. Maybe they welcome ISIS. Maybe they are ISIS.
Joe Biden is having his wish. Iraq is divided into 3 countries
The Sunni-Isis entity
The Kurds
The shiite rump that’s controlled by Iran
America should not fight wars like this again. Not because we are not capable of winning, but our own domestic politics and internal divisions will not let the US win.
Other than what you have stated, I don’t give a crap anymore. We spent billions and billions of dollars “training” the Iraqi military as well as giving them billion and billions of dollars worth of our equipment not to mention American blood by the 55 gallon barrel. As a result my opinion is:
The Iraqis can’t fight, or else they are chickensh*ts. They lose almost every engagement against the ISIS. Looks like the bad guys are the only ones that will fight. So as far as I am concerned, Iraq can go to hell.
Im surprised that Iran cant control a Sunni area. Well maybe not so much surprised.
But the two creeds broadly overlap in several regards, especially their reliance on fear to secure the submission of the people under the group’s rule. Two decades ago, the elaborate and cruel forms of torture perpetrated by Hussein dominated the discourse about Iraq, much as the Islamic State’s harsh punishments do today.
The hidden hand behind the Islamic State militants? Saddam Hussein’s.
Joe did not think this up. Many saw it as a possible consequence from the get go. I knew it and foolishly believed those in power had it in consideration of how many pieces the removal of Hussein put in motion. I was wrong about that last part. Or, they knew and got the outcome they wanted.
To me the most important issue here is how should the Republican Presidential Candidates handle this?
Should they emphasize the original mistake of invading in the first place, or the secondary (but much more recent) mistake of turning victory into defeat.
The temptation is to emphasize the latter and heap well-deserved condemnation on Obama for walking away from the victory that was created by the surge and letting Iraq go into free-fall when it could easily have been prevented.
But I am afraid that is not the best electoral strategy. The American people don’t want to hear about how (maybe) we should return to Iraq. As much as it might seem irrelevant now, I think on this issue it’s more prudent to say something along the lines of “President Bush didn’t fail because of faulty WMD estimates, he failed because of faulty understanding of the structure of power in that part of the world, and how necessary a strong-man in Iraq was for maintaining regional stability”.
More Americans died in Anbar than any other province. Fallujah became a symbol of al-Qaeda resistance in 2004, leading to a bloody U.S. Marine-led offensive that drove militants out of the city after intense street fighting. More than 80 Americans were killed in combat during the second battle of Fallujah in November and December, 2004.
In a speech at Ft. Bragg, NC on December 14, 2011, President Barack Obama said the United States was “leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.”
“Iraq’s future will be in the hands of its people. America’s war in Iraq will be over” he remarked. And “Iraq is not a perfect place. It has many challenges ahead. But we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people. We’re building a new partnership between our nations.”
BIG!
Anbar = Obamaville
Unconfirmed reports that ISIS contingents have taken control of Anbar Operations Command Center in central Ramadi via @AssetSourceApp
The 8th Brigade of the #Iraqi army western #Ramadi has huge military warehouse , equipments.
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