Ramadi grappling with scars of war
City that once numbered 400,000 in ruins, lacks electricity, running water
RAMADI, IRAQ— As his armoured vehicle bounced along a dirt track carved through the ruins of this recently reconquered city on Wednesday, Gen. Ali Jameel, an Iraqi counterterrorism officer, narrated the passing sites.
Here were the carcasses of four tanks, charred by the jihadis of the Islamic State group. Here, the home of a police officer the jihadis had blown up. Here, a villa reduced to rubble by an airstrike. And another. And another.
In one neighbourhood, he stood before a panorama of wreckage so vast that it was unclear where the original buildings had stood. He paused when asked how residents would return to their homes.
“Homes?” he said. “There are no homes.”
The retaking of Ramadi by Iraqi security forces last week has been hailed as a major blow to Islamic State and as a vindication of President Barack Obama’s administration’s strategy to fight the group by backing local ground forces with intensive airstrikes.
But the widespread destruction of Ramadi bears testament to the tremendous costs of dislodging a group that stitches itself into the urban fabric of communities it seizes by occupying homes, digging tunnels and laying extensive explosives.
The U.S.-led coalition that is bombing Islamic State says that the air campaign is working and that the group has lost 30 per cent of the territory it controlled in Iraq and Syria. Iraq’s prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, has vowed that 2016 will see Islamic State “terminated in Iraq.”
Still, the question looms of what such a victory would leave behind. The coalition’s successes in Kobani, Syria and Sinjar, Iraq, have also left communities in ruins, with few resources to rebuild. And defeating Islamic State will require extracting it from the much larger cities of Raqqa, Syria, and Mosul, Iraq, as well as from many other towns and villages.
Iraqi officials said that their forces now held 80 per cent of Ramadi, about115 kilometres west of Baghdad and the capital of Sunni-dominated Anbar province, and that fighting continued on the outskirts.
During a visit on Wednesday, the booms of artillery fire filled the air, followed by clouds of smoke rising on the horizon. Two Iraqi attack helicopters circled, and jets from the international coalition growled overhead. Before the offensive, there were questions about what part of Iraq’s security apparatus should lead the fighting.
In the end, it appears that heavy coalition airstrikes opened the way for the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service, generally considered the country’s most professional and capable security force. Formed by the United States about a decade ago, and still receiving training and support from the U.S. military, it operates exclusively under Abadi’s office.
The Iraqi army, meanwhile, had little presence, limited to staffing artillery posts and running checkpoints outside the city, some of which provocatively flew the flags of Shiite martyrs.
Nor was there much sign of the thousands of Sunni fighters recently trained by the United States to join the fight against Islamic State. Iraqi and coalition officials said they were not considered combat troops, but were used to hold areas seized by other forces.
The scars of war in Ramadi were visible just about everywhere.
Many streets had been erased or remained covered in rubble or blocked by trenches used in the fighting. To reach their command centre in the city’s southwest, Iraqi forces took a meandering, bumpy dirt track through neighbourhoods full of collapsed homes, shrapnelridden shop fronts and swimmingpool-size craters left by airstrikes.
Entire areas are considered no-go zones because they have yet to be searched for booby traps left by the jihadis.
Few civilians remain from a population that once numbered around 400,000, and the city lacks electricity and running water, meaning that supplies must be trucked in, leading to traffic snags between armoured vehicles and water and fuel tankers.
A tour of the neighbourhood gave a glimpse of how the jihadis had fought. Tunnels passed under streets, and paths between houses were obscured by tarps or slats of wood to hide fighters’ movements from surveillance drones.
The force’s commander, Lt. Gen. Abdul-Ghani al-Asadi, said in an interview that a few hundred jihadis had been killed, mostly in airstrikes. Very few had been taken prisoner.
“They don’t surrender,” Asadi said. “They blow themselves up.”
Iraqi and coalition officials placed blame for the city’s destruction on the jihadis, who mined roads and buildings and detonated the homes of anyone connected to the Iraqi government.
This week, they detonated explosives on the ground floor of the Ramadi General Hospital, the largest in the province, damaging the building as security forces approached, Asadi said.
Col. Steven H. Warren, a Pentagon spokesman in Iraq, said, “One hundred per cent of this is on ISIL, because no one would be dropping any bombs if ISIL hadn’t gone in there,” using an acronym for Islamic State.
But the heavy dependence on air power also clearly played a role. The coalition has launched more than 630 airstrikes in the area since July, and Asadi said his counterterrorism force advanced only once the coalition had cleared the way.
Local officials worry that the money needed to rebuild the city will not materialize, given the magnitude of the need and disastrous effects of low oil prices on Iraq’s budget.