USA defence chief in Baghdad to discuss war on IS

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter speaks during a joint news conference following a meeting with his British counterpart Michael Fallon at the Pentagon in Washington December 11, 2015.

The Obama administration has been talking for days about “accelerating” the fight against IS, but that effort is complicated because there is some Iraqi reluctance to having a greater USA footprint in the country.

The Iraqi Kurdish regional government issued a statement late Wednesday saying the peshmerga forces repelled several IS assaults and killed over 70 IS fighters “in a major coordinated attack across several fronts” that also included 25 airstrikes by U.S.-led coalition warplanes.

Abadi said he believes Iraqi forces are making progress.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Abadi said Iraqi forces were “on the verge of breaking the back” of Islamic State.

The United States has said it is willing to deploy advisers and attack helicopters to help Iraq retake Ramadi, west of Baghdad.

Davis said the withdrawal should not be seen as a change in the USA commitment to Turkey or to the counter-ISIS campaign. The Iraqi government says they are not welcome and must withdraw.

U.S. Defence Secretary Ashton Carter arrived in Arbil on Thursday for talks with Iraqi Kurdish officials on the war against the ISIL armed group.

The US recently announced its decision to deploy a specialised expeditionary targeting force to combat ISIS in Iraq.

The fall of Ramadi, capital of Anbar province, to Islamic State in May was the worst defeat for Iraq’s weak central government in almost a year, dampening its hopes of routing the group from the country’s north and west.

Abadi expressed confidence to Carter that Iraqi troops would soon retake Ramadi from ISIS and position the Iraqi military to move on Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, which has been under ISIS control since the summer of 2014. But they could “make a difference in the future”, he said.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Wednesday’s fighting demonstrated it had been right to send additional forces to protect its personnel: “This attack showed how legitimate our concerns were about the security of Bashiqa camp”, it said. So far they have not.

Iraqi officials did not appear ready to seize upon all forms of USA assistance on offer. He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with government rules.

“Boots on the ground, per se, is not at all a new fact, given that, what I just said – which is in just one country, namely Iraq, but a very important one, there are, actually a little bit more than 3,500 USA troops”.