The United States has accused Iraqi forces of showing “no will to fight” Islamic State fighters who seized a crucial city west of the capital, Baghdad, and rejected calls to commit ground troops to the conflict.
The Iraqi forces defeated by IS fighters in their takeover of Ramadi were not outnumbered and in fact showed “no will to fight”, Defence Secretary Ashton Carter said.
“What apparently happened was that the Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight. They were not outnumbered, but, in fact, they vastly outnumbered the opposing force, and yet they failed to fight. They withdrew from the site,” Carter said in an interview to CNN.
“That says to me, and I think to most of us, that we have an issue with the will of the Iraqis to fight the IS and defend themselves,” he said.
He said the US can give training and equipment to Iraqi forces, but cannot give them the will to fight. “But if we give them training, we give them equipment and give them support and give them some time, I hope they will develop the will to fight,” Carter said.
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Carter’s remarks are the strongest yet from any Obama administration official speaking on the record since the last week’s events when Ramadi fell.
Iraqi forces, he insisted, are the ones who have that to beat the IS and keep then keep them beaten.
“We can participate in the defeat of IS but we can’t make Iraq run as 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,” he said.
Carter said he was not prepared to recommend sending ground troops into Iraq. In the wake of IS advances, some lawmakers including Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain -- have called for more American forces on the ground in Iraq. Currently, there are about 3,000 US military personnel training Iraqi forces, but they are not near combat areas.
“If there comes a time when we need to change the kinds of support we’re giving to the Iraqi forces, we’ll make that recommendation,” the defence secretary said, adding that what happened at Ramadi was a failure of the Iraqi forces to fight.
“So our efforts now are devoted to providing their ground forces with the equipment, the training, and to try to encourage their will to fight so that our campaign enabling them can be successful both in defeating IS and keeping IS defeated in a sustained way,” Carter said.
Image: A Kurdish People’s Protection Units fighter stands atop of a burnt tank that belonged to Islamic State fighters in Aliya village after saying that they retook control of the area from IS in the southern countryside of Ras al-Ain. Photograph: Rodi Said/Reuters
