Just because another provincial capital in Iraq is on the verge of falling doesn’t mean ISIS is not on the “path to defeat.” At least this is how the Obama regime will spin it.
(Reuters) – Islamic State militants raised their black flag over the local government compound in the Iraqi city of Ramadi on Friday after overruning most of the western provincial capital.
The insurgents attacked Ramadi overnight using six suicide car bombs to reach the city center, where the Anbar governorate compound is located, police sources said.
Fighting continued on Friday in parts of Ramadi, 100 km (60 miles) west of Baghdad, and government forces were still in control of a military command center in the west of the city.
If Ramadi were to fall completely to Islamic State it would be a strategic blow to Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s government, barely six weeks after the army and Shi’ite militias recaptured the city of Tikrit from Islamic State.
The militant group said it had stormed Ramadi’s provincial government compound and taken control after “eliminating the apostates” who remained inside.
Police said the militants used an armored bulldozer to remove blast walls blocking the road to the police department adjacent to the provincial government building and blew the vehicle up when it reached there.
A Humvee packed with explosives targeted the education department and a third car bomb was detonated at the western entrance to the governorate building in central Ramadi.
UPDATE: The severity of this defeat to Obama’s campaign against ISIS can not be overstated.
BAGHDAD — Islamic State fighters took control of Ramadi, capital of Iraq’s largest province Friday, police in the city said, in what appeared to be a significant blow to a U.S.-backed military campaign to retake Iraqi territory from the extremist Sunni group.
By early afternoon, the militants had seized the government compound in downtown Ramadi, which is the capital of western Anbar province. Government forces had managed to hold on to the largely Sunni Muslim city of about 900,000 people in recent months, despite regular attacks by the Islamic State. The militant group seized most of the rest of Anbar last summer.
“The city’s fallen. They’ve taken it,” Maj. Omar Khamis al-Dahl, a senior officer in the Ramadi police, said by telephone.
The governor of Anbar province, Sohaib Alrawi, denied that Ramadi had fallen, saying in a tweet that the situation in the city was “dire” but that battles continued.
Dozens of soldiers fled the city overnight Thursday during the initial stages of the Islamic State attack, which involved heavy artillery and multiple car bombings, said Dahl. Over 60 police officers have been killed in the fighting, and hundreds of police and soldiers were surrounded in a military compound in the center of the city, he said.
“We have not received reinforcements from the government, and there will be a massacre of these people like there was in Speicher,” said Dahl. He referred to a former U.S. military base near Tikrit where an estimated 1,700 Iraqi soldiers were captured and killed en masse by the Islamic State last summer.