CAIRO—The Iraqi military said on Monday that its forces have recaptured the main government complex in Ramadi from Islamic State (IS) fighters who have occupied the city since May, providing a strategic victory and a morale boost to the country’s struggling security forces.
Antiterrorism troops hoisted the national flag atop the key complex in the long-contested Sunni Muslim city west of Baghdad, Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool, Iraqi joint operations spokesman, said in a televised statement.
Rasool claimed that Ramadi had been fully liberated.
However, Maj. Gen. Ismail Mahalawi, head of operations in Iraq’s western Anbar province, later told reporters that the militants still controlled parts of the city. Fighting was reported in downtown Ramadi, as well as in some communities on the city’s eastern and northern outskirts.
The recapture of Ramadi, the Anbar provincial capital and its most populous city, would be the most significant in a series of recent successes by the Iraqi forces, which collapsed in the face of rapid IS advances in mid-2014. Since the spring, the militants have been driven from the northern cities of Tikrit and Beiji, as well as Sinjar, a northwestern town near the Syrian border.
But defense experts caution that it is too soon to speak of a turning point in the struggle against IS. The group still controls large stretches of Iraq and neighboring Syria, including most of the rest of Anbar and the large, densely populated city of Mosul in the north of Iraq.
“It’s a good tactical victory,” said Ben Connable, a retired Marine Corps intelligence officer who served three tours in Iraq before joining the Rand Corp., a think tank. “But really, we are just back to where we were six months ago. So to paint this as a strategic victory against IS I think is a gross exaggeration.”
The seizure of the government compound in Ramadi followed a week of intense fighting as Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s forces pressed into the center of the heavily defended city after seizing ground on the periphery.
All the bridges leading into Ramadi had been destroyed before the advance began, US and Iraqi officials said. Barriers had been erected in every street and the ground seeded with explosives. There were also sniper nests and mortar batteries to contend with, they said.
“The clearance of the government center is a significant accomplishment and is the result of many months of hard work,” Col. Steven Warren, a spokesman for US forces in Iraq, said in a statement.
He said the US-led coalition, which includes major European and Middle Eastern powers, had carried out more than 630 air strikes in the area, provided training and advice to Iraqi units, and contributed specialized equipment to clear explosives.
Iraqi state television broadcast footage of Iraqi troops celebrating inside the government compound on Monday. Some could be seen slaughtering a sheep, while others raised their weapons and danced.
“Now will be a process of going block by block…clearing out booby traps and clearing out small pockets of resistance,” Warren told the Los Angeles Times. “That could take time. Ramadi is a fairly large, densely populated center. Every house is a potential bomb.”
Image credits: AP