Associated Press: TEHRAN: An Iranian newspaper is quoting the chief of an elite unit in Iran's Revolutionary Guard accusing the U.S. of allowing ISIS to seize the Iraqi city of Ramadi, the latest criticism to follow the fall of the city.
The report in Monday's edition of the daily newspaper Javan, which is seen as close to the Guard, comes after U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter accused Iraqi forces of lacking the "will to fight" in an interview aired the day before.
The newspaper quoted Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Guard's elite Quds unit, as saying the U.S. didn't do a "damn thing" to stop the extremists' advance on Ramadi.
Soleimani also was quoted as asking: "Does it mean anything else than being an accomplice in the plot?"
Iraqi troops lack will to fight: U.S.
BAGHDAD: Washington Sunday accused Iraqi forces of lacking the will to fight ISIS militants who scored a resounding victory a week earlier with the capture of Ramadi. The loss of Ramadi, capital of Iraq’s largest province of Anbar, raised questions over the strategy adopted not only by Baghdad but also by Washington to tackle ISIS.
Pentagon chief Ashton Carter told CNN the fall of Ramadi, Baghdad’s worst military defeat in almost a year, could have been avoided.
“What apparently happened was the Iraqi forces showed no will to fight. They were not outnumbered, and they vastly outnumbered the opposing force, and they failed to fight and withdrew from the site.”
“That says to me, and I think to most of us, that we have an issue with the will of the Iraqis to fight [ISIS] and defend themselves,” he said.
The U.S.-led coalition air war that began two months after ISIS seized swaths of Iraq in June 2014 has led to more than 3,000 strikes.
“Airstrikes are effective but neither they, or really anything we do, can substitute for the Iraqi forces’ will to fight,” Carter said.
Analysts usually argue that while airstrikes cannot ensure territorial reconquest, they have at least prevented ISIS from spreading even further to key cities such as Baghdad or the Kurdish capital Irbil.
The coalition said it conducted another 17 strikes over a 24-hour period straddling Saturday and Sunday, including seven in Anbar.
Several units of Iraqi security forces, including elite troops, defied their chain of command and retreated from Ramadi when ISIS advanced.
The Anbar police chief has already been replaced and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi promised an investigation.
The capture of the Anbar capital together with the ISIS takeover of Palmyra in eastern Syria has consolidated the jihadis’ grip on the heart of their self-proclaimed caliphate. ISIS forces Sunday crossed from Syria with two suicide car bombs to attack the Iraqi side of the southern border crossing of Al-Walid. Iraqi border guards promptly retreated to a nearby crossing with Jordan, arguing they had repeatedly called for reinforcements, in vain.
Iraqi forces Saturday retook Husaybah, a rural town in the Euphrates Valley 7 km east of Ramadi, but a fully fledged counterattack to retake the provincial capital did not appear to be underway. They were also battling ISIS on other fronts, including at the Beiji oil refinery, 200 km north of Baghdad.
Officials in Haditha, the last major Anbar city in government control, said ISIS executed 16 traders bringing back food goods from Beiji. Their bodies were found on the road side by residents. A Haditha tribal leader said a paper was found on one of them in which ISIS claimed the executions were to avenge the men they lost in recent fighting near Haditha.
In Diyala province, which the government claimed to have cleared of ISIS fighters in January, eight bombs went off almost simultaneously early Sunday, security sources said. Intelligence had been received of a possible wave of bomb attacks and only 14 people were wounded in the blasts in the towns of Baqouba and Baladruz, a senior official said.
