Capture of city highlights threat of Islamic State

WASHINGTON – The Islamic State’s capture Friday of the Iraqi provincial capital of Ramadi provides new evidence of the Iraqi army’s weakness, the terrorist movement’s resilience and the shortcomings of the Obama administration’s strategy for defeating the extremists, experts said.

As a result, President Barack Obama could come under pressure to step up U.S. military intervention in Iraq and Syria unless Iraqi security forces swiftly retake Ramadi and prevent the fall of other cities in what appears to be a major Islamic State drive to overrun Anbar, Iraq’s largest province and the heartland of its Sunni Muslim minority.

“If this offensive … isn’t stopped quickly, it certainly raises major, major questions about U.S. strategy,” said Kenneth Katzman, a senior analyst at the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. “If the whole of Anbar goes, I think it’s hard to see how (Islamic State) is defeated in the short term, and that raises questions about whether the U.S. has to commit more.”

Under Obama’s strategy, a U.S.-led international military coalition has been conducting airstrikes, and training and advising Iraqi forces with the aim of halting and then reversing the territorial conquests Islamic State has made since last June, when the insurgents charged into northern Iraq from civil-war-ravaged Syria and rolled to the outskirts of Baghdad.

Obama, however, won’t deploy U.S. combat forces to bolster the Iraqi army, which is being rebuilt after all but disintegrating last year in the face of the Islamic State onslaught.

Moreover, the U.S. lacks an effective strategy for dealing with Islamic State’s bases in Syria – beyond a training program for opposition fighters that has only just begun – where the extremist movement is now pursuing two offensives against the forces of President Bashar Assad.

In the past several months, Islamic State has suffered some setbacks at the hands of Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish fighters, Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim militias and Iraqi security forces and tribal fighters, most recently with the loss in April of Tikrit, the hometown of the late Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein.

The reversals prompted some senior U.S. officials and military commanders to proclaim progress in the campaign to crush the extremists, who they claim have suffered thousands of casualties and lost large amounts of military hardware in some 6,000 U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq and Syria over the past nine months.

Administration and U.S. military officials on Friday sought to maintain that line, insisting that Islamic State hadn’t overrun all of Ramadi, an industrial city of 900,000, and would be driven back from the areas they had seized.

The Islamic State made only “temporary gains in the east and south of the city,” said Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Thomas Weidley, the deputy commander of Operation Inherent Resolve.

“We firmly believe Daesh is on the defensive throughout Iraq,” he said in a briefing for Pentagon reporters, using a derogatory Arabic term for Islamic State.

That version, however, seemed to be undercut by the announcement late Friday that the United States was expediting the delivery of shoulder-fired rockets to counter the kinds of car bombs that the Islamic State had deployed so effectively in their assault at Ramadi. The announcement came after Vice President Joe Biden spoke with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al Abadi.

“There is no way you can look at the last week and say everything is going brilliantly,” said Daniel Byman, a senior fellow with the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “Politically there is going to be pressure to say things aren’t going well and we need to do more. So the political pressure will be there.”

Chris Harmer, an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War, said the U.S.-led coalition’s air war has been much less significant than the U.S. military acknowledges. The Iraqi army’s weakness is one major reason.

“The air campaign has been very effective in hitting targets but completely ineffective in affecting the course of the battle,” he said. “Air power without significant ground forces is at best irrelevant and at worst counterproductive.”

Should Islamic State succeed in consolidating its grip on Ramadi and capture other Anbar towns against which its forces have been advancing, pressure could build on Obama to rethink his strategy for defeating the extremists, experts said.

But with the public adamantly opposed to sending combat troops back to Iraq, Obama’s options will likely be limited to stepping up the air campaign and the arming and training of Iraqi forces, experts said.