War of Words: Ramadi a Propaganda Coup for ISIS
U.S. officials struggle to reconcile seizure of strategic city with rhetoric that ISIS is losing.
A Shiite militia member stands guard outside the group's headquarters on Monday in the Iraqi city of Basra. Shiite militias converged on Ramadi in a bid to recapture it from jihadists who overran the city in a deadly three-day blitz.
An American commando raid in Syria over the weekend that killed a senior Islamic State group leader and gleaned valuable intelligence should have led news headlines on Monday morning. Instead, top military and intelligence officials were left trying to explain how the extremist network was able to seize control of Ramadi, a highly visible city on the road to Baghdad that the U.S. as recently as Friday considered all but safe.
A war of words continues, as both sides try to convince the world the momentum is in their favor. For the Islamic State group, it seems like yet another win.
After laying siege to Ramadi for almost a year, the Islamic State group and its fighters were finally able to breach and overrun the symbolic Sunni Muslim city, the largest in Anbar province and the site of hard-fought and bloody U.S. gains against al-Qaida fighters during the last Iraq War. It’s the extremist group’s most significant victory since their initial onslaught from Syria last summer.
Reports of the fall of Ramadi came less than three days after a senior military official assured reporters at the Pentagon that the Islamic State group is “on the defensive.” Marine Brig. Gen. Thomas Weidley confirmed on Friday the Islamic State group had launched a complex attack on Iraqi forces at Ramadi, despite 165 airstrikes against extremist positions this month alone, but he predicted the Iraqi forces would prevail.
“We firmly believe ‘Daesh’ is on the defensive throughout Iraq and Syria, attempting to hold previous gains, while conducting small-scale, localized harassing attacks, occasional complex or high-profile attacks, in order to feed their information and propaganda apparatus,” said Weidley, using another name for the Islamic State group. He spoke remotely from the headquarters of the combined joint task force for the war against the Islamic State group, known as Operation Inherent Resolve.
Intelligence at the time indicated the Iraqi Security Forces would successfully beat back the Islamic State group from any gains they had made around Ramadi, and that they could ultimately be driven out of the critical city entirely.
That was no longer the case after this weekend.
“ISIL is obviously not on the defensive in Ramadi. That’s fairly clear,” spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren said Monday.
Hundreds died as the Islamic State group moved into Ramadi, and thousands have been displaced.
Members of the Iraqi military, which the U.S. is once again trying to train into a steadfast standing land force, fled most of their posts as of Monday morning, while those who remained behind were being actively hunted by Islamic State group kill squads. It’s a significant setback for the Iraqi military and government under the tenuous leadership of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.
“Ramadi has been surrounded for probably a year now, and I think it’s notable that it took ISIL a year to get this far in Ramadi,” Warren said. “All of that said, this is certainly going to be a setback for the residents of Ramadi who will now be subjected to ISIL’s brutality, and we’ve already started to see some of that. We’ve seen executions, we’ve seen murder, we’ve seen trademark ISIL barbarity.”
“That said, we will retake Ramadi. What this means is that now we have to, along with our Iraqi partners, retake Ramadi,” Warren said. He added that the group remains on the defensive across the breadth and depth of the battlefield.
Warren declined to confirm a timeline for mounting a counterattack set forward by Secretary of State John Kerry, the highest U.S. official to have commented on the capture of the city. At a press conference alongside his South Korean counterpart early Monday, Kerry reasserted that the Islamic State group remains on the defensive and has been driven back from most of its positions. He indicated Iraqi forces will rally and start to retake ground within a matter of weeks.
“Their communications have been reduced, their funding and financial mechanisms have been reduced, and their movements by and large, and most certainly where there are air patrols and other capacities, have been reduced,” Kerry said of the extremists’ prospects. “But that’s not everywhere. And so it is possible to have the kind of attack we’ve seen in Ramadi, but I am absolutely confident in the days ahead that will be reversed.”
The widely publicized victory, however, will likely inspire the group to advance on other high-profile targets, perhaps even Baghdad itself. Despite the Shiite Muslim majority there, the Islamic State group could possibly find some sympathy among fellow Sunni Muslims in the westward parts of the capital, says Zaineb Al-Assam, senior analyst at IHS Jane’s in an assessment on Monday.
“The loss of Ramadi reflects how far off the government is from redressing weaknesses that led to the Iraqi Army's initial collapse last summer,” Al-Assam wrote, “including the lack of army morale, poor leadership, and corruption (including large numbers of 'ghost' soldiers on the army's payroll) and lack of effective Iraqi government air support.”
American insistence that the Islamic State group is losing appears tone deaf to those worldwide who hear an opposing view. The network’s propaganda arm has proven adept at disseminating reports that it thoroughly controls ground it has taken, like in Raqqa, Syria, considered the capital of its self-proclaimed caliphate, or Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city now farther from the grasp of the U.S.-led coalition following the fall of Ramadi.
And until the Islamic State group has no more safe havens, any defeats it may experience on the battlefield will only be temporary.
“ISIS can flex into low-profile stances and survive the loss of single cities, reclaiming them in the near or mid-term,” the Institute for the Study of War’s Jessica Lewis McFate wrote in an analysis released Monday. Her paper was published before the fall of Ramadi, and indeed she agrees that the extremist network is on the path to defeat. But its ability to retreat to other safe havens, most notably in Syria, and broadcast its strength confirms fears that this war cannot be won with American airpower and Iraqi ground forces alone.
“ISIS will likely even survive the loss of every city in Iraq if its cities in Syria are left standing. ISIS can flex until it loses control of every city in Iraq and Syria at one time. Only if ISIS loses its claim to rule urban areas entirely will ISIS’s caliphate be destroyed,” she writes.
The U.S. has made gains against the Islamic State group. The weekend raid into Syria by U.S. Army Delta Force commandos resulted in the death of Abu Sayyaf, considered a key planner and financier for the Islamic State group. The raiders were forced to kill him, but successfully captured his wife, who, Warren says, can be canvassed for further intelligence on the group.
But until the U.S. is able to cobble together some form of strategy that includes stabilizing both Iraq and Syria, it likely will continue a war of rhetoric surrounding victories and defeats in places like Ramadi.
