A Bleak Symbolic Defeat
Over the weekend, as ISIS fighters rolled into Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar Province, one of them posted a video to the internet. It was shot from a recently captured Iraqi police station, and showed box after box of American mortar shells and bullets that appeared shiny and new. Several Humvees, apparently not long out the packing crates, sat abandoned nearby. “This is how we get our weapons,” the narrator said in Arabic. “The Iraqi officials beg the Americans for weapons, and then they leave them here for us.”
depressing isn’t it? The fall of Ramadi is not just a bleak symbolic defeat for the Iraqi government and its allies, including the United States. During the nearly nine years that American troops fought in Iraq, Anbar Province was one of the most lethal places for American soldiers and Marines; some thirteen hundred died there. In 2008, though, when the Americans finally handed the city back to the Iraqi Army, many of the American Marines present at the ceremony there were not even carrying weapons. After so much bloodshed, Ramadi had become one of the safest cities in the country.
All of that is gone now. Along with the western half of Mosul, which ISIS captured last summer, Ramadi represents the second pillar of the group’s Iraqi domain. To the west, the Islamic State, as the group calls itself, stretches across the Syrian border and up the Euphrates River, all the way to the suburbs of Damascus. Ramadi’s fall underscores just how troubled the American-backed campaign against ISIS is; increasingly, it seems, the effort to defeat the group is colliding with the very nature of what Iraq and Syria are—or, more accurately, what they are not.
In the past several months, there have been hopeful moments. In March, the Iraqi Army recaptured Tikrit, an important provincial capital, behind a barrage of American airstrikes. Last week, an airstrike appears to have killed Abu Alaa al-Afari, who had assumed substantial control of ISIS following the wounding of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS’s founder. Over the weekend, on orders from President Obama, a team of American commandos moved into Syria and killed Abu Sayyaf, an ISIS leader who oversaw the group’s oil-smuggling operations, one of its many money streams. These events appeared to set the stage for a much-anticipated operation to retake western Mosul, which Iraqi and American officials said would get under way this summer. When Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi visited the White House last month, American officials were so encouraged by the progress that they bestowed another two hundred million dollars or so on the Iraqi government. (The U.S. has spent about $1.9 billion on military operations and hardware in Iraq and Syria in the most recent operations.)
What happened in Ramadi over the weekend revealed just how misplaced any optimism about Iraq really is. The town, dominated by members of Iraq’s Sunni minority, was largely being held by the Iraqi Army, which has proved to be a deeply fractured and incompetent institution. Last June, when ISIS first swept out of Syria and into northern Iraq, large parts of the Iraqi Army largely disintegrated. Since then, the focus of American efforts has been to rebuild the Army and turn it into an effective fighting force. Even by American assessments, this is a long-term project. The disaster in Ramadi proved just how difficult the challenge is.
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http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-real-problem-in-iraq
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