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Victory in Ramadi
Victory in Ramadi may not yet be proof of strategy, but it is a milestone
By Karen DeYoung January 1 at 1:53 PM
When the Iraqi city of Ramadi fell to the Islamic State in May, the White House called it a “setback.” The administration’s many critics called it a disaster and proof that President Obama’s strategy to defeat the militants was failing.
Fast-forward seven months, and Iraqi security forces, backed by coalition air power, recaptured Ramadi this week. But even the administration itself has hesitated to call the victory a vindication or claim it as evidence that the militants are close to the destruction Obama has promised.
“Ramadi was a test of whether the Iraqi security forces were willing to fight” after their 2014 collapse in Mosul, Iraq’s second-
largest city, and later in Ramadi, a senior administration official said. This time, instead of running away, “they incurred huge losses and they didn’t flinch.”
“That’s why Ramadi was important,” the official said of the city about 80 miles west of Baghdad. “It’s not a turning point, but it’s an important milestone.”
Previous significant battles had been won largely by Kurdish forces, known as peshmerga, assisted by U.S. airstrikes, in the northern city of Sinjar in November or with Iranian-backed Shiite militias in the central city of Tikrit in March. This time, although U.S.-trained Sunni fighters are now moving into Ramadi to stabilize the area, the Iraqi army was largely alone on the ground.
Although the Ramadi victory has engendered at least modest optimism, there are far tougher battles ahead, including a much-delayed offensive to retake Mosul. That densely populated urban center in the north, with triple the population of Ramadi, has served as the Islamic State’s center of operations in Iraq since the militants overran it 18 months ago.
Islamic State fighters numbered in the hundreds in Ramadi; there are thousands in Mosul. Reinforcements are expected from neighboring Syria, where efforts to dislodge the Islamic State have been hampered by an ongoing civil war.
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.