BAGHDAD — As it moves to try to reverse the stunning loss of Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s largest Sunni province, the Shiite-led government is hamstrung by the sectarian politics it has failed to overcome ever since the Islamic State group began its rampage more than a year ago.
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi vowed Tuesday to arm Sunni tribesmen to help retake Ramadi, a plan the United States has encouraged to better empower the minority community in the fight to defend their cities and to reduce their support for the Sunni extremists.
But the pledge met immediate skepticism from Sunnis, given that similar promises after Islamic State militants seized the northern city of Mosul last summer were barely implemented. It also met quick resistance from Shiite rivals within al-Abadi’s own government, who oppose arming Sunnis.
At the same time, the government was rallying Iranian-backed Shiite militiamen to join the offensive, raising the prospect of dangerous frictions in a country that was nearly torn to pieces by bloody Shiite-Sunni violence from 2006-07.
Although the Shiite militiamen have been crucial to reversing other losses to the Islamic State, they have been accused of abuses against Sunnis in those areas.
“The plan is looking like a failure,” Ihsan al-Shamari, a political analyst who lives in Baghdad, told The Washington Post. “Now the Sunnis are even more suspicious of the government, and now it will be even harder to get them to cooperate with a political system that they already deeply distrusted.”
Iraqi troops abandoned dozens of U.S military vehicles, including tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery pieces when they fled Ramadi on Sunday, the Pentagon said.
Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren estimated that a half dozen tanks were abandoned, a similar number of artillery pieces, a larger number of armored personnel carriers and about 100 wheeled vehicles like Humvees. He said some of the vehicles were in working condition; others were not because they had not been moved for months.
This repeats a pattern in which defeated Iraq security forces have during the past year left behind U.S.-supplied military equipment, prompting the U.S. to destroy them in subsequent airstrikes.
“Certainly preferable if they had been destroyed; in this case they were not,” he said.
Warren also said that while the U.S. is confident that Ramadi will be retaken by Iraq, “It will be difficult.”
The capture of Ramadi was a major blow to the U.S.-backed strategy against the Islamic State. During the past months, the combination of regular troops, Shiite militias and Kurdish fighters backed by U.S.-led airstrikes have managed to reclaim territory from the Islamic State across northern and western Iraq.
Many of the militias are in effect the military wings of powerful Shiite parties, a fact that ensures backing at the highest political levels. In the case of at least one militia, Asayeb al-Haq, or League of the Righteous, a political party was formed and secured seats in parliament in last year’s elections.
