BAGHDAD - Iraq on Monday rejected accusations by the US defence chief that its security forces dodged battle in Ramadi and lack the will to fight the Islamic State group.
Pentagon chief Ashton Carter argued that the May 17 fall of Ramadi, the worst defeat Baghdad has suffered in almost a year, could have been avoided.
“We have an issue with the will of the Iraqis to fight ISIL and defend themselves,” he told CNN on Sunday, using one of the acronyms of the jihadist group.
Washington has been one of Baghdad’s key partners in the war to reclaim the ground lost to IS last year and Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi expressed disbelief at Carter’s stinging comments. “I’m surprised why he said that. I mean, he was very supportive of Iraq. I am sure he was fed with the wrong information,” Abadi told the BBC.A senior Iranian general involved in the fight against IS hit out at Washington, saying it had failed to help Iraqi forces in Ramadi despite its military presence at the Al-Asad air base in the same province.
“How can you be in that country under the pretext of protecting the Iraqis and do nothing? This is no more than being an accomplice in a plot,” said Qassem Suleimani, the Revolutionary Guards’ commander of foreign operations.
Meanwhile, Islamic State poured more fighters into Ramadi as security forces and Shi’ite paramilitaries prepared to retake the Iraqi city that fell to the Islamists a week ago in a major setback for the government. In Palmyra, the Syrian air force struck at buildings captured by the militant group, whose arrival has raised fears that the city’s famed Roman ruins will be destroyed.
The air force levelled Islamic State “hideouts” and killed a large number of its members around Palmyra’s military air base, Syrian state media said.
Islamic State has killed at least 217 people execution-style, including children, since it moved into the Palmyra area 10 days ago, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Another 300 soldiers were killed before the Syrian city was captured, the monitoring group said.
The insurgents reinforced Ramadi on Monday, deploying fighters in preparation for battle against security forces and paramilitary groups advancing on the provincial capital, which lies 110 km (70 miles) northwest of the capital, Baghdad.
Iraqi forces have regained ground east of Ramadi since launching a counter-offensive on Saturday, a week after it was overrun, and on Monday retook a rural area south of the city.
Police sources said Iraqi forces supported by Iran-backed Shi’ite militia and locally recruited tribal fighters had retaken parts of al-Tash, 20 km (12 miles) south of Ramadi.
Pro-government tribal fighters, with the help of the army, laid land mines to reinforce their defensive lines around Baghdadi, a settlement northwest of Ramadi which controls access to a major Iraqi air base. Islamic State attacked Baghdadi with seven suicide car bombs on Sunday.
In Ramadi, residents said trucks carrying Islamic State fighters arrived on Sunday evening.
Local man Abu Saed heard a commotion outside his house in the city’s southeastern Officers neighbourhood. “I saw two trucks pull up outside with dozens of fighters carrying arms running quickly into nearby buildings and taking cover.”
Another resident said at least 40 fighters had jumped out of three trucks that arrived in the southern al-Tamim district on Sunday evening.
“They were carrying weapons and wearing mostly khaki dress with ammunition belts wrapped around their chests,” said Abu Mutaz. “They were talking in an Arabic dialect, they were not Iraqis.”
The seizures of Ramadi and Palmyra were Islamic State’s biggest successes since a US-led coalition launched an air war against it last year.
The near simultaneous victories against the Iraqi and Syrian armies have forced Washington to examine its strategy of bombing from the air while leaving fighting on the ground to local forces.
In a sharp criticism of Washington’s ally, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter on Sunday accused the Iraqi army of abandoning Ramadi to a much smaller enemy force.
A spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi dismissed the comments as “untimely and surprising at a time when Iraqi security forces are preparing to launch a counter offensive to retake Ramadi”.
The general in charge of Iran’s paramilitary activities in the Middle East meanwhile said the United States and other powers were failing to confront Islamic State.
“Today, in the fight against this dangerous phenomenon, nobody is present except Iran,” said Major General Qassem Soleimani, who is often seen on the battlefields of Iraq.
But in a move that could mark an expansion of US involvement in the conflict, Turkey said it and the United States had agreed in principle to give air support to some forces from Syria’s mainstream opposition.
Days after taking Ramadi, Islamic State defeated Syrian government forces to capture Palmyra, home to 50,000 people and site of some of the world’s most extensive and best-preserved Roman ruins.
The Observatory said there had been no reports so far of Islamic State destroying Palmyra’s ruins and artifacts.
The militants have proclaimed a caliphate to rule over all Muslims from territory they hold in Syria and Iraq. They have carried out mass killings in towns and cities they have captured, and destroyed ancient monuments, which they consider evidence of paganism.
In Syria, Hezbollah fighters captured two hilltops from al Qaeda’s Syria wing, the Nusra Front, in areas close to the Lebanese border and killed dozens of enemy combatants, Hezbollah-run al-Manar television reported on Monday.
Iranian-backed Hezbollah has backed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his country’s civil war. The group’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, has vowed to clear the border area of militant groups that have carried out attacks on Lebanese soil.