Thousands of homes destroyed in Iraq’s Ramadi

Under Abadi, who already purged his forces of loyalists to the previous Shiite Prime Minister, the Baghdad regime has begun wiping out the Army’s Sunni leadership, replacing it with members of the Iran-guided Badr Corps, one of the stronger Shiite militias.

Still working on a bloody, destructive military operation which has seen them mostly recapture and largely destroy the Anbar capital city of Ramadi, Iraqi leaders are saying that Mosul, the largest city under ISIS control, is to be the “next” target.

No official estimates have been released of either government or ISIS casualties, or the death toll among the Ramadi residents who had not fled. And over the weekend, they made a final push to seize its central administration complex.

Another officer said the Iraqi army has yet to gain full control of a single Ramadi neighborhood.

The liberation of Fallujah will follow, which, if successful, will set the stage for the long-awaited offensive against Mosul using numerous same tactics employed in Ramadi: cut off, surround, and methodically penetrate under the protection of persistent air cover. It’s using that airpower as the force multiplier that it really can be. Several of them were linked to the deadly attacks in Paris, and one had direct ties to the ringleader of the November 13 rampage.

The victory in Ramadi comes at a time when the IS has been pushed on to the back foot. They’re also dealing with booby-trapped buildings and streets, along with fighting on the outside of the city’s center.

Warren declined to predict how long that would take. We can’t defeat them with our current strategy. I spoke with him earlier today.

“With the help of Allah, We are getting closer to you every day”, al-Baghdadi told his Israeli listeners. That’s on Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who’s been slowly working to bridge the divide to the Sunnis, who were alienated by Abadi’s predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki.

Security sources said insurgents clashed with federal police and tribal fighters on Wednesday in Husaiba al-Sharqiya and Jweba, on the eastern fringes of Ramadi.

MATT BRADLEY: Well, he’s been trying to do that. “And right now that’s still, on balance, not really the case”.

However, that was really denied.

As Gen. Colin Powell once said of Iraq, “You break it, you bought it”. “We will continue to stand with the Iraqi people until Daesh is defeated”.

The recapture of Ramadi has nevertheless lifted the morale of Iraq’s troops.

The fall of the province’s capital to the militants was a sign of how far Iraq’s unravelling as a nation state had come since the overthrow in 2003 of Saddam Hussein.

American officials said the U.S.-led coalition backing Iraqi forces had carried out more than 630 air strikes in the area over the past six months and provided training and equipment. Daniel Byman, an American analyst of Islamic extremist movements, told the New York Timesyesterday that the Anbar tribes “want a high degree of independence, but they also want to be on the side of the winners”. That area – shown in the map below surrounded by green areas now controlled by the Iraqi government – will likely be a focus of the military coalition in coming days.

Ramadi and Fallujah, Sunni Arab cities where distrust of the Shiite-led government runs deep, were major bastions of the insurgency in the years after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.