Devastated city: Ramadi, once home to 500,000 Iraqis, now largely lies in ruins.
RAMADI, Iraq — So complete was the destruction of Ramadi that a local reporter who had visited the city many times hardly recognized it.
“Honestly, this is the main street,” Amaj Hamid, a member of Iraq’s elite counterterrorism forces, told the TV crew as they entered from the southwest.
He swerved to avoid the aftermath of months of fighting: rubble, overturned cars and piles of twisted metal. Air strikes and homemade bombs laid by the Islamic State group had shredded the poured-concrete walls and ceilings of the houses and shops along the road.
Ramadi, once home to about 500,000 people, now largely lies in ruins. A U.N. report released Saturday used satellite imagery to assess the devastation, concluding that more than 3,000 buildings had been damaged and nearly 1,500 destroyed in the city 70 miles west of Baghdad. All told, more than 60 percent of Anbar’s provincial capital has been destroyed by constant air bombardment and the scorchedearth practices of Islamic State fighters in retreat.
Officials are already scrambling to raise money to rebuild, even as operations continue to retake neighborhoods in the north and east. Their concern is that the devastation could breed future conflicts, recreating the conditions that allowed the Islamic State group to first gain a foothold in the province in late 2013.
In previous fights for the city, government buildings, bridges and key highways bore the brunt of air strikes and heavy artillery. But during the most recent round of violence, air strikes targeted the largely residential areas where Islamic State fighters were based.
After the group overran Ramadi in May, storming and then largely destroying the city’s symbolically important central government complex, fighters quickly fanned out into the city’s dense neighborhoods. Using civilian homes as bases, militants turned living rooms into operations centers and bedrooms into barracks.
Brig. Gen. Muhammad Rasheed Salah of the Anbar provincial police said if civilians don’t start receiving compensation soon, tribal violence will quickly follow liberation.
“Listen, I am a son of this land,” he said. “My house was destroyed by someone I know. He was my friend, my neighbor. In cases like this, you need to be able to provide people with something.”
U.S. and Iraqi officials estimate the price tag for rebuilding to be in the hundreds of millions. The Iraqi government, in the midst of an economic downturn triggered in part by the falling price of oil, has shifted almost all costs of rebuilding to the provinces.