Iraq deploys coalition-trained troops to Ramadi fight for first time

[Sally]

It remains to be seen if they will fight any better than they did last time.


Iraq deploys coalition-trained troops to Ramadi fight for first time
Three thousand troops including 500 Sunni tribesmen will be sent to take Anbar's capital which was seized two months ago

Iraqi military train at the Counter Terrorism Service training location during a visit of US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter to Baghdad Photo: AFP

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By Reuters

6:39PM BST 23 Jul 2015


Iraq has for the first time deployed troops trained by the US-led coalition in their campaign to retake the city of Ramadi from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), sending 3,000 of them in recent days, a Pentagon spokesman said on Thursday.

Colonel Steve Warren told reporters travelling with Ash Carter, the defence secretary that 500 Sunni tribesmen, whose training by Iraqis was overseen by US troops, were also taking part in the operation. He declined to say how many Iraqi forces in total were involved in the Ramadi operation.

The Iraqi forces, backed by US-led coalition air strikes, were in the process of encircling Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, in an effort to choke off Isil supplies and trap their fighters, ahead of a push to seize the city, Col Warren said.

Continue reading at:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/11759147/Iraq-deploy

 

[Moonglow]

The US also put in air force command controllers to coordinate attacks also...

 

[Sally]

The US also put in air force command controllers to coordinate attacks also...

I just hope these newly trained stand their ground and don't run away like the last group.

 

[waltky]

ISIS not de-fanged quite yet...

Islamic State suffers double blow as Ramadi falls, leaders killed
Tue Dec 29, 2015 - U.S.-led forces have killed 10 Islamic State leaders in air strikes, including individuals linked to the Paris attacks, a U.S. spokesman said, dealing a double blow to the militant group after Iraqi forces ousted it from the city of Ramadi.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi planted the national flag in Ramadi after the army retook the city centre from Islamic State, a victory that could help vindicate his strategy for rebuilding the military after stunning defeats. "Over the past month, we've killed 10 ISIL leadership figures with targeted air strikes, including several external attack planners, some of whom are linked to the Paris attacks," said U.S. Army Colonel Steve Warren, a spokesman for the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamist group also known by the acronym ISIL. "Others had designs on further attacking the West."

A member of the Iraqi security forces holds an Iraqi flag at a government complex in the city of Ramadi​

One of those killed was Abdul Qader Hakim, who facilitated the militants' external operations and had links to the Paris attack network, Warren said. He was killed in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Dec. 26. Two days earlier, a coalition air strike in Syria killed Charaffe al Mouadan, a Syria-based Islamic State member with a direct link to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader of the coordinated bombings and shootings in Paris on Nov. 13 which killed 130 people, Warren said.

A destroyed building is seen near a government complex in the city of Ramadi​

Mouadan was planning further attacks against the West, he added. Air strikes on Islamic State's leadership helped explain recent battlefield successes against the group, which also lost control of a dam on a strategic supply route near its de facto capital of Raqqa in Syria on Saturday. "Part of those successes is attributable to the fact that the organization is losing its leadership," Warren said. He warned, however: "It's still got fangs."

"EXCITED ABOUT THIS VICTORY"

See also:

US Gear and Guidance Played Key Role in Ramadi Success
Twenty-one armored bulldozers supplied by the U.S. played a key role in the successful assault by Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) on Ramadi's city center but Islamic State holdouts posed a continuing threat, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad said Tuesday.

In a sign that Ramadi had not been fully secured, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi was forced to cut short a victory visit to the city Tuesday when three mortar rounds hit about 500 meters from his convoy into the city. Abadi had arrived by helicopter and toured the devastated city in a convoy of Humvees with the governor of Anbar province. Abadi's party greeted jubilant soldiers and crossed over a portable bridge thrown up earlier this month with the guidance of Army engineers from the 814th Multi-Role Bridging Company based at Fort Polk, Louisiana. Despite the persistent threat of ISIS snipers and booby-trapped buildings, "We don't think the remaining enemy has the oomph to push the Iraqi security forces off of their positions" in Ramadi, Army Col. Steve Warren said. "This organization (ISIS) is losing its leadership. We are striking at the head of this snake," said Warren, a spokesman for Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve. "We haven't severed the head of this snake yet, and it's still got fangs -- we have to be clear about that. There's still much more fighting to do," Warren said in a video briefing to the Pentagon from Baghdad.

In the push to retake Ramadi, the ISF took a page from the U.S. Army's playbook on urban warfare tactics, employing 21 armored bulldozers to cover the advance, Warren said. As ISF tracked vehicles led the way cautiously, the bulldozers pushed up berms on either side of the advance to shield troops from sniper fire and possible flank attack by ISIS VBIEDs, or Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices, Warren said. "This is grown-up work here" by the ISF in urban tactics that will provide a template for future actions against ISIS as the Iraqis turn to liberating other areas from the insurgent group that stormed out of Syria in pickup trucks 18 months ago, Warren said. In Ramadi, the ISF had punctured the myth of ISIS' invincibility, Warren said. "These guys are not that tough. They will crack and they will collapse" under pressure, he said.

Abadi declared Thursday a national holiday to celebrate the retaking of Ramdi, the provincial capital of Anbar province which fell to ISIS last May. He also declared 2016 "the year of the final victory," when ISIS will be expelled from Iraq and the major cities they still hold, including Mosul and Fallujah, will be liberated. Warren said he could not give an immediate estimate on how many civilians may have been killed in the Ramadi offensive. He estimated that ISF forces killed in action were "in the low double digits, if that," while the number of ISIS fighters killed was in the hundreds. U.S. officials had estimated that Ramadi was defended initially by 650-1,000 ISIS fighters. Warren said that about 200-300 ISIS fighters were believed to be still in the area, mostly on the outskirts of Ramadi to the north and east.

US Gear and Guidance Played Key Role in Ramadi Success | Military.com

 

[waltky]

Ramadi finally re-taken, but at a high cost as city is destroyed...

Iraq routed IS from Ramadi at a high cost: A city destroyed
May 5,`16 ) -- This is what victory looks like in the Iraqi city of Ramadi: In the once thriving Haji Ziad Square, not a single structure still stands. Turning in every direction yields a picture of devastation.

A building that housed a pool hall and ice cream shops - reduced to rubble. A row of money changers and motorcycle repair garages - obliterated, a giant bomb crater in its place. The square's Haji Ziad Restaurant, beloved for years by Ramadi residents for its grilled meats - flattened. The restaurant was so popular its owner built a larger, fancier branch across the street three years ago. That, too, is now a pile of concrete and twisted iron rods. The destruction extends to nearly every part of Ramadi, once home to 1 million people and now virtually empty. A giant highway cloverleaf at the main entrance to the city is partially toppled. Apartment block after apartment block has been crushed. Along a residential street, the walls of homes have been shredded away, exposing furniture and bedding. Graffiti on the few homes still standing warn of explosives inside.

When Iraqi government forces backed by U.S.-led warplanes wrested this city from Islamic State militants after eight months of IS control, it was heralded as a major victory. But the cost of winning Ramadi has been the city itself. The scope of the damage is beyond any of the other Iraqi cities recaptured so far from the jihadi group. Photographs provided to The Associated Press by satellite imagery and analytics company DigitalGlobe show more than 3,000 buildings and nearly 400 roads and bridges were damaged or destroyed between May 2015, when Ramadi fell to IS, and Jan. 22, after most of the fighting had ended. Over roughly the same period, nearly 800 civilians were killed in clashes, airstrikes and executions.

Smoke rises from Islamic State group positions after an airstrike by U.S.-led coalition warplanes in the Iraqi city of Ramadi in this Dec. 25, 2015 file photo during the Iraqi government offensive that drove the militants out of the city. Ramadi, the provincial capital of Iraq’s Sunni heartland, was declared “fully liberated” early this year. But the cost of victory may have been the city itself, with widespread destruction from strikes, artillery and the militants' scorched earth tactic of destroying buildings and infrastructure as they fled.​

Now the few signs of life are the soldiers manning checkpoints, newly painted and decorated with brightly colored plastic flowers. Vehicles pick their way around craters blocking roads as the dust from thousands of crushed buildings drifts over the landscape. Along one street, the only sign that houses ever existed there is a line of garden gates and clusters of fruit trees. The wreckage was caused by IS-laid explosives and hundreds of airstrikes by the Iraqi military and the U.S.-led coalition. Besides the fighting itself, the Islamic State group is increasingly using a scorched earth strategy as it loses ground in Iraq. When IS fighters withdraw, they leave an empty prize, blowing up buildings and wiring thousands of others with explosives. The bombs are so costly and time-consuming to defuse that much of recently liberated Iraq is now unlivable. "All they leave is rubble," said Maj. Mohammed Hussein, whose counterterrorism battalion was one of the first to move into Ramadi. "You can't do anything with rubble."

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