WASHINGTON -- Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Sunday that Iraqi forces had demonstrated "no will to fight" against the Islamic State, blaming them for a retreat that led to the terrorist group's victory in capturing the Iraqi city of Ramadi.
While that critical assessment of Iraqi security forces has been voiced in Congress and by policy research institutes, Carter's remarks on CNN's State of the Union were some of the administration's strongest language to date about Iraq's repeated inability to hold and take back territory from the Islamic State extremist group.
"They were not outnumbered. In fact, they vastly outnumbered the opposing force, and yet they failed to fight and withdrew from the site," he said. "That says to me and, I think, to most of us, that we have an issue with the will of the Iraqis to fight ISIL and defend themselves," he added, using an alternate acronym for the Islamic State.
The Iraqis left behind large numbers of U.S.-supplied vehicles, including several tanks, now presumed to be in Islamic State hands.
Carter said U.S. and allied airstrikes have been "effective," and reiterated the Obama administration's opposition to sending U.S. ground troops to work alongside Iraqis on the front lines to offer more accurate guidance for bombing.
Some members of Congress, including Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., have called on President Barack Obama to authorize U.S. troops to accompany Iraqi forces on the battlefield.
The administration is focused on continuing to bolster the Iraqi forces, who will ultimately win or lose the fight, Carter said.
"If there comes a time when we have to change the kinds of support we give, we will make that recommendation," Carter said. "But what happened in Ramadi was a failure of the Iraqi forces to fight, and so our efforts now are devoted to providing their ground forces with the equipment, the training, and encouraging their will to fight so that our campaign enabling them can be successful -- both in defeating ISIL and keeping ISIL defeated in a sustained way."
Iraqi lawmaker Hakim al-Zamili, the head of the parliamentary defense and security committee, called Carter's comments "unrealistic and baseless."
"The Iraqi army and police did have the will to fight IS group in Ramadi, but these forces lack good equipment, weapons and aerial support," said al-Zamili, a member of the political party headed by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is anti-American.
He said the U.S. should bear much of the blame for the fall of Ramadi and that the U.S. military is seeking to "throw the blame on somebody else."
The comments come as the Islamic State appears to be surging, tightening its grip on Anbar province in Iraq and parts of Syria after U.S. and Iraqi officials last month highlighted the group's setbacks.
Obama told Atlantic magazine in an interview published Thursday that losing Ramadi was only a "tactical setback" and that it didn't signal the fight was being lost. He said, "Ramadi had been vulnerable for a very long time, primarily because these are not Iraqi security forces that we have trained or reinforced."
Targeting equipment
Over the past year, defeated Iraq security forces have repeatedly left U.S.-supplied military equipment on the battlefield, which the U.S. has targeted in subsequent airstrikes against Islamic State forces. The Pentagon last week estimated that when Iraqi troops abandoned Ramadi, they left behind a half-dozen tanks, a similar number of artillery pieces, a larger number of armored personnel carriers and about 100 wheeled vehicles like Humvees.
The list of airstrikes overnight in Iraq announced by the Pentagon on Sunday included four near Ramadi that destroyed 19 armored vehicles. It was unclear whether any of those had been recently abandoned by the Iraqi army.
The fall of Ramadi is reviving questions about the effectiveness of the Obama administration's approach in Iraq, a blend of retraining and rebuilding the Iraqi army, prodding the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad to reconcile with the nation's Sunnis and bombing Islamic State targets from the air without committing American ground combat troops.
Obama's strategy is predicated on Baghdad granting political concessions to the country's alienated Sunnis, who are a source of personnel and money for the Islamic State. But Baghdad has continued to work closely with Shiite militias backed by Iran, which have been accused of atrocities against Sunnis, a religious minority group that ruled Iraq for centuries until Saddam Hussein fell from power.
The U.S. has sought to reach out on its own to Sunni tribes and is training some Sunni fighters, but those efforts have been limited by the small number of American troops on the ground.
McCain, who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on Sunday repeated his call to send U.S. ground troops into Iraq.
"We need to have a strategy," he said on CBS' Face the Nation. "There is no strategy. And anybody that says that there is I'd like to hear what it is. Because it certainly isn't apparent now."
Carter defended the use of U.S. airstrikes, but he said they are not a replacement for Iraqi ground forces willing to defend their country.
"We can participate in the defeat of ISIL," he said. "But we can't make Iraq ... a decent place for people to live -- we can't sustain the victory, only the Iraqis can do that and, in particular in this case, the Sunni tribes to the West."
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, said on ABC's This Week that while he would rather not send U.S. ground troops to Iraq, some military leaders believe that U.S. advisers could have targeted more effective airstrikes in the battle for Ramadi. "We have tied our own hands in a variety of ways," he said.
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called the loss in Ramadi a "serious setback" and said the Islamic State group is a threat to U.S. security.
"We have to make sure that we don't react the wrong way to that threat," Schiff said on CBS. "We could aggravate it by sending a lot of Americans troops in. And there's a particular risk of escalation if we do."
Helicopter Crashes
In Syria, a military helicopter crashed earlier Sunday at the northern air base of Kweiras, killing all of its crew members, state TV said, as an activist group said it was shot down by Islamic State militants.
The TV report quoted an unnamed military official as saying that the helicopter crashed as a result of a technical problem while taking off. The report did not say how many crew members were on board.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Islamic State militants who have been laying siege to the base for months shot down the helicopter.
Kweiras military air base is in the northern province of Aleppo and is close to the town of al-Bab, which is held by the Islamic State, and the group posted a statement on a militant website claiming responsibility.
Meanwhile, the Syrian army deployed troops in areas near the ancient town of Palmyra in apparent preparation for a counterattack to retake it from the Islamic State, an official said.
Gov. Talal Barazi of the central province of Homs, which includes Palmyra, said Sunday that Islamic State members have "committed mass massacres in the city of Palmyra" since they captured it Wednesday. He said militants took many civilians, including women, to unknown destinations.
Activists in the town have said Islamic State fighters have hunted down President Bashar Assad's loyalists since taking the town, killing some 280 people.
Barazi said troops are fighting with militants in the nearby Jizl area. "There are plans, but we don't know when the zero hour for a military act in Palmyra," Barazi said.
State-run news agency SANA said Islamic State members are still preventing people from leaving Palmyra.
Also Sunday, Saudi Arabia's king vowed to punish those responsible for a rare suicide bombing that killed 21 people at a Shiite mosque in the country's east.
King Salman made the pledge hours after the Interior Ministry confirmed that Friday's attack in the village of al-Qudeeh in the eastern Qatif region was the work of an Islamic State militant, backing up an earlier claim of responsibility by the group.
The Interior Ministry identified the bomber as Saudi citizen Saleh bin Abdulrahman al-Qashaami in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency late Saturday.
"Every participant, planner, supporter, collaborator or sympathizer with this heinous crime will be held accountable, tried and punished," King Salman said in a message addressed to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, who is deputy premier and minister of interior. "Our efforts will never stop ... fighting the deviant thought, confronting the terrorists and wiping out their hotbeds."
Information for this article was contributed by Emmarie Huetteman of The New York Times; by Ken Dilanian, Sameer Yacoub, Julie Pace, Bassem Mroue, Albert Aji, Fay Abuelgasim, Abdullah al-Shihri and staff members of The Associated Press; and by Jesse Hamilton of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 05/25/2015