Around 350 ISIS fighters killed in Iraq

Carter’s remark Wednesday was the latest sign of US willingness to intensify its involvement in the fight against the IS.

He said it would be done “if circumstances dictate and if requested by Prime Minister [Haider] al-Abadi”.

Following significant advances on Ramadi Tuesday, Iraqi forces are now preparing to push into the city center from the southwest and the north. Tuesday’s advances, the most significant incursion into Ramadi since the city fell to the Islamic State group in May, have placed Iraqi forces along the southwest edge of Ramadi in the Tamim neighborhood and just north of the city at the former Anbar operations command.

But he pointed to significant gains, including recapturing the Anbar Operations Centre on the northern bank of the Euphrates River in the past 24 hours.

Image: Defense Secretary Ash Carter testifies on the strategy to counter ISIS before the US Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington. An A310 MRT aerial refuelling jet left separately from Cologne-Wahn base for the Incirlik airbase in southern Turkey. Officials estimated the overall ISIS force there before the strikes at 600 to 1,000.

“We have said… and the president has said this, that in the fight against ISIL (the acronym for the Islamic State), this is not a fight with Muslims or Islam”, said Carter in a joint press conference with visiting Indian Minister of Defense Manohar Parrikar.

On Tuesday, Iraqi forces seized an IS operations center and the strategical Tamim neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.

Ashton Carter, the U.S. defence secretary, made the calls for broader global action at a congressional hearing in which he outlined stepped-up United States military efforts against ISIL following the attacks in Paris and California.

“What they’ve also done now is they’ve really cut themselves off”, he said.

He suggested Sunni forces might not need to occupy territory but instead work at “enabling local forces”.

The United States last week announced plans to deploy elite American military teams to Iraq to conduct raids against Islamic State there and in neighboring Syria.

“I, too, wish that particularly the Sunni Arab nations of the [Persian Gulf] would do more”, Carter said.