US plays catch up amid stunning Daesh offensive

Washington: The United States is rushing 1,000 anti-tank rockets to the Iraqi military to help combat the suicide vehicle bombs that Daesh terrorists used in capturing the provincial capital of Ramadi, a first step as the Obama administration weighs a range of difficult options to help its beleaguered ally.

The deployment of the weapons, expected to arrive in early June after Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi of Iraq asked for them during a visit to Washington last month, comes as the defeated Iraqi security forces are regrouping outside the city. A senior State Department official said Wednesday that Iraqis were “licking their wounds a bit” as they worked with US advisers to begin planning a counterattack.

Obama administration officials have called the fall of Ramadi a huge setback, but they have sought to quell critics in the region and on Capitol Hill by portraying the defeat as a temporary blow that will not change the overall strategy for fighting Daesh or lessen its support of Al Abadi’s government.

Still, a day after President Barack Obama gathered his national security team to discuss the latest developments in Iraq and how to retake Ramadi, officials across the government expressed dismay at the rapid collapse of the Iraqi security forces in Ramadi and the tough decisions ahead. Daesh is at the same time making substantial gains across the border in Syria.

“You’d have to be delusional not to take something like this and say, what went wrong and how do you fix it?” said the senior State Department official, who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration assessments and plans. “This is an extremely serious situation.”

The immediate US objective during the past four days, the official said, has been to work with Iraqi political leaders and commanders to consolidate the retreating Iraqi forces.

US warplanes are flying round-the-clock missions over the city, hunting fighters from Daesh, who were setting up defensive positions or trying to seize vehicles and other equipment abandoned by the Iraqi troops.

The options the administration is considering in Iraq include training a cadre of Iraqi special operations forces troops to help US bombs get to their targets faster and expanding the training of regular Iraqi security forces.

The training of Iraqi special forces would be an alternative to using US troops to accompany Iraqi soldiers on the battlefield to call in US and allied bombing attacks. So far Obama is not considering using Americans to call in air strikes, the State Department official said, although Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has pushed the idea.

Al Abadi complained during his visit to Washington that it had been taking too long for the United States to carry out air strikes on behalf of Iraqi forces.

The other option, expanding US efforts to train and equip Iraqi security forces as well as Sunni tribal fighters, is also problematic. Doing so would likely require even more US advisers and trainers on the ground in Iraq.

A major flaw in the Iraqi security forces remains the lack of credible Sunni ground forces. Sunni politicians have criticized Al Abadi for being too weak to secure long-promised reforms, including the establishment of national guard units, a move that US officials have encouraged as a way to empower local Iraqis but that is still being debated by the Iraqi Parliament.

Iraq has budgeted to train and equip 8,000 Sunni fighters in Anbar province, and about 5,000 of them have been deployed so far there, US officials said.

In Iraq on Wednesday, government security forces, joined by Shiite militiamen from Baghdad and other parts of the country, continued to gather at a base in Habbaniya, east of Ramadi in Anbar. At the same time, the government put out a call for new recruits to join the depleted army.

Al Abadi is in the meantime looking beyond the United States for help. He flew to Russia on Wednesday in an effort to secure more military support. Russia has been a supplier to Iraq of weapons, including fighter jets, helicopters and smaller arms, for some time.

When Daesh terrorists stormed an operations centre in Anbar on Sunday they captured a large cache of weapons, including arms supplied by both the United States and Russia, according to a security official who had been stationed there.

Vice President Joe Biden, in a phone call Friday, as the attack was underway, assured Al Abadi of other accelerated US security assistance to combat Daesh, according to a White House statement. The weaponry includes AT-4 shoulder-held rockets to counter the car bombs Daesh detonated in the attack on Ramadi’s city centre.

As US advisers in Iraq sought to help Iraqi forces regroup, administration officials voiced new concerns about 3,000 Shiite militia fighters, many supported by Iran, who have arrived at a military base near Ramadi as part of the effort to reclaim the city. US officials say they will continue their air campaign as long as the Shiite militias are led by the Iraqis, and not by Iranian advisers.

“We have been clear that the decision to use these forces is one of the government of Iraq to make in conjunction with Anbari leaders,” a White House spokesman, Eric Schultz, said Wednesday. “But we’ve also been very clear that all forces there should be under the command and control of the Iraqi security forces.”