U.S. army: ISIS militants still in Ramadi

Another picture showed him crossing what appeared to be the pontoon bridge erected by Iraqi forces to enter Ramadi after Islamic State blew up the city’s bridges.

Mouadan, who had reportedly had contact with Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected leader of the Paris attacks, was killed December 24 in an airstrike over Syria, U.S. Army Col. Steve Warren said.

“Within what we call central Ramadi they estimate still up to 400 Daesh [ISIS] members and then once you go east of that toward Fallujah you’ve got about 300 out there in that direction”, U.S. Army Captain Chance McCraw was quoted by Reuters.

He met soldiers at the main government complex captured by counter-terrorism forces on Monday and planted the tri-colour flag outside the building.

Abadi took office in September 2014 after the Islamic State advance, pledging to reconcile Iraq’s warring sectarian communities.

Al-Belawi said the fighters retreated mainly to the eastern neighborhoods of Sijariya and Sufiya.

“We didn’t expect them to retreat from a number of Ramadi areas today, where we entered without any resistance, as if they evaporated”, he said.

But the high cost of liberating Ramadi raises questions about whether the same tactics can be brought to bear in Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, which remains under IS control, or other dense urban areas in Iraq and Syria, where IS militants live among civilians. “Electricity and water services have been damaged”, the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR said in a statement on Wednesday. The prime minister was not in danger but was forced to leave the area, they said. “We thank God we freed them, and now we are transferring them to secure locations”, said the Iraqi Counterterrorism Unit’s Major Salam Hussein, using an Arabic acronym for IS. “The Iraqi Ministry of Interior has also fired several thousands of other Sunni security forces in the past several weeks while continuing to arrest and “disappear” thousands of Sunnis”, sources told The Hill.

Despite the attention the American media have given the re-taking of Ramadi, deeming it a triumph of President Barack Obama’s strategy for sustaining the Abadi government and combating the Islamic State, Americans don’t care who holds Ramadi. “While many of us see the change of year as ‘turning over a new leaf, ‘ ISIL may do the same”.

Iraq’s prime minister accused Turkey on Wednesday of failing to respect an agreement to withdraw its troops from the country’s north and its foreign minister said if forced, Iraq could resort to military action to defend its sovereignty. But Iraq and its Western allies had best curb its enthusiasm: Counting the win as a major victory obscures how bad Iraq still has it. While the reduction of Islamic State territory is a delight in the abstract, in this case it comes with a reminder that the ongoing collapse of Iraq has much less to do with ISIS than we’d like to believe.

Many Sunni residents in Iraq’s sprawling Anbar province initially welcomed the Islamic militants as liberators. Even if Iraq drives the extremists out, they would retain their grip on large parts of Syria, where an increasingly complex civil war has sucked in regional powers and left the USA with few reliable allies.