WASHINGTON: The United States encouraged the Iraqi forces on Tuesday to expel the rebels from Ramadi as the country’s deputy prime minister also questioned his troops sudden collapse in the rebel enclave.

On Sunday, US Secretary of Defence Ashton Carter criticised the Iraqi forces for their failure to defend Ramadi, noting that “they vastly outnumbered the opposing force. And yet they failed to fight; they withdrew from the site”.

Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al Mutlaq told CNN on Monday evening that the army’s willingness to let Ramadi fall had surprised him too.

“It’s not clear for us why such a unit, which was supposed to be trained by the Americans for years, and supposed to be one of the best units in the army, would withdraw from Ramadi in such a way?” he asked.

But Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al Abadi disagreed. He told the BBC on Monday that he believed Secretary Carter was “fed with the wrong information.”

And on Tuesday, both the White House and the State Department said that Mr Carter’s criticism focused on one particular incident, the fall of Ramadi last week, and it was not a general assessment of the Iraqi armed forces.

“The Iraqis have suffered setbacks before and were able to retake territory from IS, such as in Baghdadi in western Anbar,” a senior White House official to reporters in Washington.

Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister al Mutlaq, a Sunni who leads his own party, warned that if Iraqi troops did “not see a future for them in Iraq, they will not fight Daesh, IS, in the way we want them.”

He said in 2007 and 2008 the same troops fought the rebels because they thought they could have a future.

Mr Mutlaq was referring to the Sunni Awakening, in which Sunni Iraqis, backed by the United States, rose up against Al Qaeda. It was a movement that began in Anbar province, of which Ramadi is the capital.

“The Sunni people, they are not with IS, this is for sure.” But “they are not certain now … if they fight IS, what is after IS? … What is going to happen after IS?”

Published in Dawn, May 27th, 2015

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