Islamic State Claims To Have Seized Iraqi City of Ramadi

Transcript

ARUN RATH, HOST:

In Iraq, there are reports that a major city, Ramadi, has fallen to the self-named Islamic State, or ISIS. Ramadi is in Western Iraq, not far from Baghdad. And it's in a province where the U.S. has been conducting airstrikes against ISIS since September of last year and where U.S. forces have been helping train anti-ISIS fighters. But none of that seems to be stopping the group. NPR's Alice Fordham has reported extensively from Iraq and is now following the situation from Beirut. Alice, what do we know about what's happening in Ramadi?

ALICE FORDHAM, BYLINE: We have been hearing mixed reports from officials, but it's clear that ISIS have made very significant gains. When NPR spoke with a tribal leader whose men have been fighting against ISIS, he described a complex attack with suicide attackers and vehicles, as well as ISIS ground fighters, on Friday on the government compound, on police headquarters, the main market, administrative buildings in Ramadi. And he said they were all taken and that the operations command, the place where the military coordinates, was under siege from four sides. Now there's an announcement from ISIS that we haven't verified, but it claims to hold an army base. And I've just been watching footage of Iraqi army vehicles apparently fleeing from Ramadi.

RATH: Does this come as a shock? Was this another lightning attack by ISIS, like the one we saw in Mosul last summer?

FORDHAM: Absolutely not. No. The tribal sheik I mentioned that we spoke with and a politician from Anbar province, which is where Ramadi is, both said they've been warning the government for months that this would happen eventually. There's been heavy fighting in Ramadi, really, for months. And there's been waves of displacement and people coming back again as the battle has ebbed and flowed there.

The slightly longer back story to this is that much of Anbar province has been under the control of ISIS for about 18 months. It's long been opposed to the government - a very restive place - and there was a lot of support for ISIS there. ISIS are a Sunni extremist group, and the people in Anbar are overwhelmingly Sunni.

The nearby city of Fallujah has been under ISIS control, more or less, for more than a year. And throughout this period, the local leaders and a lot of the international advisors and some parts of Iraq's government have said that pushing ISIS is back in Anbar depends on bringing local leaders, local tribal fighters on side, arming them and paying them. And consistently, those tribal leaders and the politicians that we're speaking to have said that this hasn't happened on the necessary scale.

RATH: Alice, just yesterday, U.S. forces killed a key ISIS figure in Syria. There have been numerous American operations and regional anti-ISIS forces against ISIS. What does this tell us about the state of the war against ISIS now?

FORDHAM: Well, one interpretation is that ISIS are still capable of offensive maneuvers. As you say, Iraqi and American forces have sought to emphasize victories, like the retaking of the city of Tikrit in Iraq. But the fact is that in central Syria, for example, around the historic city of Palmyra, we've seen ISIS advances in the last few days that have been pushed back with considerable effort by Syrian forces. Or around the Baiji oil refinery in Iraq, which has been a battleground for months and which ISIS still control parts of - and it's proven very difficult to dislodge them. Plus, there have been suicide bombings likely connected with them in previously more sheltered places, like Damascus in Syria and Erbil in Iraq. So while it may be correct to say that their offensive capacities have been weakened, I don't think it necessarily indicates that they have been destroyed.

RATH: NPR's Alice Fordham. Alice, thank you.

FORDHAM: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.