BAGHDAD — Iraqi forces on Tuesday reported progress in the military operation to retake the city of Ramadi from the Islamic State, saying they made the most significant incursion into the city since it fell to the militants in May.
Losing Ramadi — the capital of sprawling western Anbar province and Iraq’s Sunni heartland — was a major blow to the Iraqi government. It was the government’s biggest defeat since Islamic State militants swept through areas in the country’s north and west, including Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul, in summer 2014.
Iraqi forces announced a counteroffensive shortly after Mosul fell, but progress has been sluggish. Clawing territory back from the Islamic State has proven more difficult than expected.
Col. Steve Warren, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Baghdad, said there are 250 to 350 Islamic State fighters in Ramadi, as well as several hundred outside the city.
“I think the fall of Ramadi is inevitable,” Warren told Pentagon reporters. “But that said, it’s going to be a tough fight. … It’s going to take some time.”
He said American military advisers remained outside the city at al-Taqaddum, a desert air base that is serving as a training site. It was a U.S. military hub during the 2003-11 war.
Iraqi spokesman Sabah al-Numan said troops crossed the Euphrates River north of the city and its Warar tributary to the west and pushed into downtown Ramadi.
From the south, troops led by the counter-terrorism agency made progress in the Dubbat and Aramil neighborhoods, less than 2 miles from the city center, Gen. Ismail al-Mahallawi, head of operations in Anbar, said. Warren said U.S. officials found a pamphlet in Fallujah that was distributed to Islamic State fighters, calling on them to disguise themselves as Iraqi security forces and film themselves committing atrocities, such as killing and torturing civilians and blowing up mosques.
