Defense chief: Iraqis show no will to fight for Ramadi

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

The Islamic State group’s takeover of the provincial capital Ramadi is stark evidence that Iraqi forces lack the “will to fight,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter said in a TV interview that aired Sunday. The harsh assessment raised new questions about the Obama administration’s strategy to defeat the extremist group that has seized a strategically important swath of the Middle East.

Although Iraqi soldiers “vastly outnumbered” their opposition in the capital of Anbar province, they quickly withdrew May 17 without putting up much resistance from the city in Iraq’s Sunni heartland, Carter said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” The interview aired Sunday.

The Iraqis left behind large numbers of U.S.-supplied vehicles, including several tanks, now presumed to be in Islamic State hands.

“What apparently happened is the Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight,” Carter said. “They were not outnumbered; in fact, they vastly outnumbered the opposing force. That says to me, and I think to most of us, that we have an issue with the will of the Iraqis to fight ISIL and defend themselves.”

The White House declined to comment Sunday.

Iraqi lawmaker Hakim al-Zamili, the head of the parliamentary defense and security committee, called Carter’s comments “unrealistic and baseless,” in an interview with The Associated Press.

“The Iraqi army and police did have the will to fight IS group in Ramadi, but these forces lack good equipment, weapons and aerial support,” said al-Zamili, a member of the political party headed by radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is stridently anti-American.

American officials say they are sending anti-tank weapons to the Iraqi military. But they also noted that Iraqi forces were not routed from Ramadi— they left of their own accord, frightened in part by a powerful wave of Islamic State group suicide truck bombs, some the size of the one that destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma City two decades ago, said a senior State Department official who spoke to reporters last week under ground rules he not be identified.

“The ISF was not driven out of Ramadi,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week. “They drove out of Ramadi.”

A senior defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity noted that the troops who fled Ramadi had not been trained by the U.S. or its coalition partners.

Still, the fall of Ramadi is reviving questions about the effectiveness of the Obama administration’s approach in Iraq, a blend of retraining and rebuilding the Iraqi army, prodding the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad to reconcile with the nation’s Sunnis and bombing Islamic State group targets from the air without committing American ground combat troops.