Shia forces move in on Iraqi city taken by Islamic State

A column of 3,000 Shia militia fighters assembled at a military base near Ramadi, preparing to take on Islamic State militants advancing in armored vehicles from the captured city northwest of Baghdad, witnesses and a military officer said.

The decision by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who is a Shia, to send in the militias to try to retake the predominantly Sunni city could add to sectarian hostility in one of the most violent parts of Iraq.

Washington, which is leading a campaign of air strikes to roll back Islamic State advances and struggling to rebuild Baghdad’s shattered army, played down the significance of the loss of Ramadi, the capital of the vast western Anbar province.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said it was a “target of opportunity,” that could be retaken in a matter of days, and U.S. officials insisted there would be no change in strategy despite a failure to make major advances against Islamic State.

Warplanes in the U.S.-led coalition had conducted 19 strikes near Ramadi over the past 72 hours at the request of the Iraqi security forces, a coalition spokesman said.

The Shia militia, known as Hashid Shaabi or Popular Mobilization, “reached the Habbaniya base and are now on standby,” said the head of the Anbar provincial council, Sabah Karhout.

MASSING FOR A FIGHT

An eyewitness described a long line of armored vehicles and trucks mounted with machine guns and rockets, flying the yellow flags of Kataib Hezbollah, one of the militia factions, heading towards the base about 30 km (20 miles) from Ramadi.

The United Nations said 25,000 people fled the city after the Islamic State attack, heading east to Baghdad. Many were believed to be running from the black-clad fighters of the militia for the second time – about 130,000 left in April.

About 500 people were killed in the fighting for Ramadi in recent days.

Islamic State said it had seized tanks and killed “dozens of apostates”, its description for members of the Iraqi security forces. An eyewitness said bodies of policemen and soldiers lay in almost every street, with burnt-out military vehicles nearby.

The city’s fall marked the biggest defeat since the fall of Mosul in June last year and was a blow to the anti-Islamic State forces: the U.S.-led coalition and the Iraqi security forces, which have been propped up by Iranian-backed Shia militias.

It was a harsh return to reality for Washington, which at the weekend had mounted a special forces raid in Syria in which it said it killed an Islamic State leader in charge of the group’s black market oil and gas sales, and captured his wife.

LIMITS OF U.S.-LED STRATEGY

The Iraqi government and Shia paramilitaries recaptured the Tigris river city of Tikrit from Islamic State six weeks ago, the biggest advance since the militants swept through northern Iraq last year. But government forces have had less success in the valley of Iraq’s other great river, the Euphrates, west of Baghdad.

An army major who fought his way out of Ramadi said government forces in the area had been ordered to regroup, but soldiers were exhausted and morale was at rock bottom.

To some analysts, the fall of Ramadi shows the limits of the U.S. strategy of attacking from the air but leaving ground fighting to Iraq’s military and its Iran-backed militia allies.

“The Americans said that they have carried out air strikes against ISIS but then the group went in and defeated the local forces,” said Hassan Hassan, author of a book on Islamic State. “So they really need to come up with a whole new strategy … and really take the fight to them.”

U.S. officials said there would be no strategy change and Iraqi forces were ultimately responsible for defeating Islamic State.

“We will retake (Ramadi) in the same way that we are slowly but surely retaking other parts of Iraq, and that is with Iraqi ground forces and coalition air power,” Colonel Steve Warren, the Pentagon spokesman, said. (Reuters)