Iraqi PM warns Isis could become unstoppable as key city threatened

[umbertino]

• Haider al-Abadi calls recapture of Tikrit a ‘case study’ for liberation of Iraq
•  
• City of Ramadi ‘on verge of falling’ says adviser to Iraqi government

 

 

Kareem Shaheen in Beirut, Sabrina Siddiqui in Washington and Spencer Ackerman in New York

 

Thursday 16 April 2015 19.26 BST

 

 

 

Islamic State fighters have launched an offensive aimed at seizing the capital of the Iraq’s central Anbar province, as the country’s prime minister warned that if unchecked, the militants could become unstoppable.

 

The advance on the city of Ramadi is the most serious Isis campaign since Iraqi forces recaptured the city of Tikrit, and has displaced thousands of civilians.

 

Speaking in Washington on Thursday, the Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, said the offensive underscored the growing threat posed by Isis militants – whom he referred to using the group’s Arabic acronym “Daesh”.

 

Abadi said the group was “recruiting young people not only in Iraq but across the world – I stress across the world.

 

“It’s not only transnational, they’re trying to establish an entity on the ground. And if Daesh has developed this capability, no uniformed army can stop them. And they must be stopped,” he said.

 

The Iraqi prime minister, who in recent days has met with President Barack Obama, Joe Biden and top leaders in Congress, said air strikes by a US-led coalition would be “vital” to the broader mission against Isis.

 

The recapture of Tikrit, Abadi said, offered “a case study for how the rest of Iraq can be liberated”.

 

But the fall of Ramadi would also be a major symbolic defeat for Iraq. In areas they have seized around the city, the militants have executed hundreds of tribesmen who belonged to the Sunni Awakening movement, which was instrumental in driving jihadists out of the province with the backing of the United States.

 

“The situation is very dangerous,” said Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi expert who advises the government on Isis. “The city is on the verge of falling.”

 

The most senior US military officer played down the significance of a potential Isis victory in Ramadi.

 

“The city itself is not symbolic in any way, it’s not been declared part of the caliphate on one hand or central to the future of Iraq,” General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon.

 

“I’d much rather that Ramadi not fall, but it won’t be the end of a campaign should it fall. We’ve got to get it back.”

 

Ramadi, the administrative capital of Anbar, is split by the Euphrates river into an eastern and western section. Al-Hashimi said Isis is fully in control of the eastern part of the city, and now holds 80% of the western side, with the militant group’s fighters just a kilometre away from the Anbar operations command and two kilometres from key government buildings.

 

“The reality is that Daesh is advancing quickly,” he said.

 

Isis launched the offensive on Wednesday, taking control of the villages of Sjariyah, Albu-Ghanim and Soufiya. Iraqi government and US-led coalition warplanes struck back at some of the militant positions on Thursday.

 

But Isis is attacking the city on four fronts, fighting a guerrilla-style battle on residential streets that limits the ability of air strikes to halt their advance.

 

Sattar Nowruz, from the Ministry of Migration and Displaced, told the Associated Press that more than 2,000 families that fled Ramadi were in a “difficult situation” and have settled in southern and western Baghdad suburbs, posing a fresh humanitarian crisis. Another 400 families have sought refuge in Karbala.

 

Ramadi’s centre has long been held by the Iraqi government, with parts of the city’s outskirts falling under the militants’ sway. Isis launched a lightning offensive last summer in Iraq, conquering vast swaths of territory. Iraqi Shia militias backed by Sunni tribesmen and the army succeeded in recapturing the city of Tikrit from the terror group earlier this month.

 

But the fall of Ramadi would be a more significant symbolic victory for the group, which has urged Sunnis to rebel against the Shia-dominated central government, which has close ties to Iran.

 

Its fall would also be a warning to those Sunni tribesmen who cooperated in the fight against Isis, and offer a morale boost to its fighters, smarting from the Tikrit defeat. Al-Hashimi said the group had carried out 327 executions of “Sahwa” members in recent days, describing it as a “real massacre”.

 

Anbar was set to be the next key battleground in the fight against Isis in Iraq, along with Mosul, the group’s crown jewel in the country.

 

In Washington, Abadi insisted Iraqi fighters maintained the “upper hand psychologically” and that areas controlled by his government were increasing while those controlled by militants were rescinding.

 

“This is a war – and in a war you can win in one place and lose somewhere else,” he said.

 

Dempsey said he had urged Abadi during a meeting with the Iraqi premier in Washington to “connect these ink blots” between the Iraqi military’s campaign north of Baghdad – which Dempsey portrayed as going well – and its faltering efforts in Anbar.

 

But the general said he considered Isis’ attempt to regain the Baiji oil refinery more important than its advance on Ramadi.

 

“Baiji is a more strategic target and that’s why the focus right now is in fact on Baiji,” Dempsey said.

 

 

 

Iraqi security forces and tribal fighters pose for a photograph in central Ramadi, 70 miles (115km) west of Baghdad on Thursday. Photograph: Uncredited/AP

 

 

 

 

 

People leave their home town Ramadi on Thursday. Some 2,000 families have already fled. Photograph: Uncredited/AP

 

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/16/iraqi-city-ramadi-verge-falling-isis-prime-minister

 

[skeetdog]

Thanks umbertino...Love the openin' lines...if unchecked they could be unstoppable...Cuttin' edge news comin' out of Beirut, Washington and New York....Attack from four side with guerilla-style fightin'....They're makin' a mountain out of a mole hill...Takin' a dozen ISIS thugs and turnin' Abadi words around to sell news.....These thugs are runnin' around in thousand year old vineyards and Date plantations that they know want be hit by air strikes....

[sxsess]

That's exactly right skeet! Bunch of cave dwelling ragheads. I just wonder when the world will finally get enough of this terrorism **** and kill them all! 

[vato96]

did you look at those pictures closely? Those cars aren't the one of poor families either! Most of them don't look like the broken down busted cars you see whenever they show something in Iraq where they are trying to portray a poor country

[millionaire in training]

 Bunch of cave dwelling ragheads. 

Thats a very good description of them..........

What annoys me is that sometimes they say that they have everything under control and then we hear that they're unstoppable.............Which is it?

[ollyowl]

Iraq is becoming boring by the day.

Make the news up as you go.

What do you believe anymore.

Time to move on, this country won't change

and there will always be war between Sunni & Shia.

[djgabrielie1]

All these cities have ISIS or now just IS (Islamic State) militants within them. Always have.

 

What does it mean to be ISIS and have control over a city?

 

ISIS' stated goal is to restore the "caliphate" — an Islamic state under the rule of a community of religious scholars guided by a supreme leader, the caliph or khalifah, which is generally taken to mean the successor to the Prophet Muhammad.

 

ISIS, by contrast, puts forth a "deviant and pathological" interpretation of Islam at odds with the philosophies of the historical caliphs, said Leila Hudson, an associate professor at the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona.

 

"Islam is a religion with more than a billion adherents, the vast majority of whom are horrified at this extremism," Hudson told NBC News on Monday.

 

In June, ISIS published a manifesto (PDF) purporting to trace the lineage of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, directly back to the prophet to establish his claim to be caliph. Its voracious expansionist aims are encapsulated in this declaration: "The legality of all emirates, groups, states and organizations becomes null by the expansion of the khilafah's authority and arrival of its troops to their areas."

Territory

ISIS is only one of the commonly used abbreviations for al-Baghdadi's organization, and you can keep track of his goals by the transformations in what the group calls itself.

Before it began to explicitly move away from al-Qaeda, it was known simply as the Islamic State of Iraq. In the past year or so, it adopted a name that could be translated variously as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (both shorthanded as ISIS). "Levant" linguistically suggests a broader territory than simply Iraq and Syria, also generally encompassing Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories, and "ISIL" is the name the Obama administration continues to use.

In June, when it declared al-Baghdadi to be a descendant of Muhammad and the rightful caliph, the group dropped all pretense of geographic boundaries, calling itself simply the Islamic State (IS), aiming to take in "every Muslim believer," according to its manifesto.

Already, "there's evidence of ISIS moving into Lebanon, and people in Jordan are very worried about ISIS," Hudson said. "Part of the context for the Gazan cease-fire is so that the participants in the Israeli conflict can be sent to address the growing threat of ISIS."

Followers

The June document explicitly declares that the new caliphate is established "for the purpose of compelling the people to do what the Sharia (Allah's law) requires of them." In ISIS' view, that means anyone who doesn't believe in its severe interpretation of Islam must convert or die.

The simplicity and specificity of ISIS' message have helped it attract fighters from all over the world, including several dozen Americans, U.S. officials have told NBC News. That has given it a legitimate shot at displacing al-Qaeda itself as the world's foremost terrorist "brand," the officials said.

Money

Scholars and U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News that ISIS is the wealthiest terrorist group in the world, having raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in the past two years.

"It's like the Mafia. When it sees an opportunity to make money; it jumps in with both feet," Austin Long, an assistant professor specializing in security policy at Columbia University, told NBC News last month.

 

"Historically, they've made money on everything from protection rackets to carjacking to people's donations," Long said. "Now, they're selling resources they've taken from oil fields and oil refineries ... [and collecting] ransom" for kidnap victims.

 

ISIS vacuums up money at such an alarming rate because it's spending it just as quickly — "running a caliphate is not cheap," a U.S. official told NBC News, ticking off "the cost of governance [and] paying administrators in the towns and cities they have captured and incorporated."

 

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/deviant-pathological-what-do-isis-extremists-really-want-n194136

 

Iraq is now and has been all along a terrorist breading ground. The war on terror is now officially the reason for the war in Iraq. Target not  Saddam Hussein but Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. 

Without using bombs and bullets, they could be crippled by cutting off their funding. No more buying of anything from IS members or even related IS groups. Make them run out of supplies before they can take by force another life.

 

Certainly not revaluing a currency that they have and adding more money to their cause. As I have said before, it would appear that we are way off from seeing an RV of the Iraqi Dinar. And it doesn't matter about the HCL either until they figure out where the proceeds will go.

 

And by the way. Doing this just in Iraq is not going to make them go away.

[sandfly]

YEP MILLION