IT HAS been a long time in coming. But on December 27th Iraq’s security forces announced they had recaptured the city of Ramadi from Islamic State (IS), with only a few pockets of resistance remaining. This followed a week of heavy fighting by Iraqi security forces, local police and Sunni tribal fighters, all backed by American air strikes.
The expulsion of jihadists from the capital of Anbar, a mainly Sunni province, is a morale-boosting victory for the Iraqi army and the beleaguered government of Haider al-Abadi in Baghdad. It will go some way towards expunging the memory of the humiliating flight of the army from the city seven months ago, when a numerically inferior IS force launched a stunning assault, spearheaded by at least 30 vehicle-borne suicide bombs, some carried by armoured bulldozers carrying enough explosive to demolish entire streets. Outflanked and outgunned, even the army’s Golden Division, a highly-regarded American-trained special forces unit, succumbed to panic.
The carefully-orchestrated campaign to recover Ramadi, which saw much closer co-ordination between troops on the ground and coalition air power than in...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/1koagA0
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