BAGHDAD -- The last Iraqi security forces fled the provincial capital of Ramadi on Sunday, as the city fell completely to the militants of the Islamic State, who ransacked the provincial military headquarters, seizing a large store of weapons, and killed people loyal to the government, according to security officials and tribal leaders.
The fall of Ramadi to the Islamic State, despite intensified U.S. airstrikes in recent weeks in a bid to save the city, represented the biggest victory so far this year for the extremist group, which has declared a caliphate, or Islamic state, in the vast areas of Syria and Iraq that it controls. The fall of Ramadi also laid bare the failed strategy of the Iraqi government, which had announced last month a new offensive to retake Anbar province, a vast desert region in the west of which Ramadi is the capital.
"Ramadi has fallen," said Muhannad Haimour, a spokesman for the governor of Anbar province. "The city was completely taken. ... The military is fleeing."
Bodies, some burned, littered the streets as local officials reported the militants carried out mass killings of Iraqi security forces and civilians. Online video showed Humvees, trucks and other equipment speeding out of Ramadi, with soldiers gripping onto their sides.
With defeat looming, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi ordered security forces not to abandon their posts across Anbar province, apparently fearing the extremists could capture the entire desert region that saw intense fighting after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion to topple dictator Saddam Hussein.
Earlier Sunday, the Anbar Provincial Council met in Baghdad and voted to ask al-Abadi to send Shiite militias to rescue Anbar, a largely Sunni province. In response, al-Abadi issued a statement calling for the militias, known as the Popular Mobilization Forces and including several powerful Shiite forces supported by Iran, to be ready to fight in Anbar.
U.S. officials had worried the militias could inflame sectarian tensions in the province and ultimately make it harder to pacify.
As they considered asking for the assistance of the militias, Anbar officials met over the weekend with the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Stuart Jones, to ascertain the U.S. position on the issue. According to officials, Jones told the Anbar delegation that the United States would continue its air campaign, provided that the militias were under the command of al-Abadi, and not Iranian advisers, and that the militias were properly organized so as to avoid becoming casualties of U.S. bombing runs.
By late Sunday, a large number of Shiite militiamen had arrived at a military base near Ramadi, apparently to participate in a possible counteroffensive, said the head of the Anbar Provincial Council, Sabah Karhout.
"We welcome any group, including Shiite militias, to come and help us in liberating the city from the militants. What happened today is a big loss caused by lack of good planning by the military," a Sunni tribal leader, Naeem al-Gauoud, said.
He said many tribal fighters died trying to defend the city.
Ramadi Mayor Dalaf al-Kubaisi said more than 250 civilians and security forces were killed over the past two days, including dozens of police and other government supporters shot dead in the streets or their homes, along with their wives, children and other family members.
The U.S.-led coalition said Sunday it conducted seven airstrikes in Ramadi in the past 24 hours. "It is a fluid and contested battlefield," said Army Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman. "We are supporting [the Iraqis] with air power."
Simultaneous bombings
The final push by the extremists began early Sunday with four nearly simultaneous bombings that targeted police officers defending the Malaab district in southern Ramadi, a pocket of the city still under Iraqi government control, killing at least 10 police and wounding 15, authorities said. Among the dead was Col. Muthana al-Jabri, the chief of the Malaab police station, they said.
Later, three suicide bombers drove their explosive-laden cars into the gate of the Anbar Operation Command, the military headquarters for the province, killing at least five soldiers and wounding 12, authorities said.
Fierce fighting broke out between security forces and Islamic State militants after the attacks.
Security forces retreated from the Malaab area of Ramadi at 1:30 p.m., abandoning about 60 military vehicles to the militants, said Col. Nasser al-Alwani of the Ramadi police force. About half of the abandoned vehicles were sent by the U.S.-backed government Saturday to reinforce the neighborhood, he added.
"The retreat was complete chaos. There was no organization," al-Alwani said, describing attacks by "hundreds" of Islamic State militants.
Earlier in the day, militants posted a statement on social media by the Islamic State that described Sunday's events as a major military success, saying that the group "had imposed its control over all of Ramadi."
The deterioration of Anbar over the past month underscored the ineffectiveness of the Iraqi army, which is being trained by U.S. military advisers, and raised questions about the United States' strategy to defeat the Islamic State. At the same time, now that the militias are being called upon, the collapse of Ramadi has demonstrated again the influence of Iran.
The Islamic State, which has held areas around Ramadi for nearly a year and a half, began an offensive on the city late Thursday, and Friday afternoon captured the provincial government headquarters.
Al-Abadi on Friday promised to send reinforcements to the city, but ultimately only about 200 soldiers arrived from Baghdad to help resist in one of the last contested neighborhoods in the city, according to a security official in Anbar.
As Ramadi was close to falling Friday, U.S. officials in Washington downplayed the situation, saying it was similar to the up-and-down fighting that had been continuing there since the beginning of last year.
Backed by U.S.-led airstrikes, Iraqi forces and Kurdish fighters have made gains against the Islamic State, including capturing the northern city of Tikrit. But progress has been slow in Anbar, a Sunni province where anger at the Shiite-led government runs deep and where U.S. forces struggled for years to beat back a potent insurgency.
Syria under control
In Syria, meanwhile, an official said Sunday that the situation is "fully under control" in Palmyra despite breaches by Islamic State militants who pushed into the historic town a day earlier.
Syrian opposition activists also confirmed that militants withdrew from a government building and other areas they had seized Saturday in the northern part of the town as fighting continued.
Palmyra is home to one of the most famous UNESCO World Heritage sites in the Middle East, renowned for its Roman-era colonnades and 2,000-year-old ruins. Islamic State militants have destroyed and looted archaeological sites in Iraq and Syria.
Gov. Talal Barazi of Homs province said Syrian troops recaptured two hills from the militants late Saturday. He said army reinforcements have been sent to shore up existing troops.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 295 people have been killed since the Islamic State launched its assault around Sukhneh and Palmyra five days ago. It was not immediately possible to corroborate the observatory's account.
In the U.S. on Sunday, Republicans said President Barack Obama's order for U.S. commandos to target an Islamic State commander in Syria is part of a strategy that will do little to lessen the threat of the group.
Even as they praised the successful raid, which killed one of Islamic State's top financiers and resulted in no U.S. casualties, Republicans faulted Obama's administration for not doing more to combat the radical Sunni group that has weathered months of airstrikes.
"Any time you can degrade or take away the top leadership of an organization, it's a positive step," Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and Republican presidential candidate, said on the Fox News Sunday program.
"It doesn't take away from the fact that ISIS remains a group that just, in the last 48 hours, has captured yet another critical city within Iraq," he added, using an alternate acronym for the group.
"The president has done a good job with these special- operations type missions," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said on ABC's This Week. "Where I think the administration has fallen down is they tend not to favor, generally speaking, capture and interrogation."
A man the U.S. called Abu Sayyaf -- a nom de guerre -- who was identified as a leader of the group's oil, gas and financial operations, was killed along with about a dozen other militants, administration officials said.
Abu Sayyaf was thought to have connections with Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and some knowledge of the group's finances, making him a high-value target for potential intelligence, U.S. officials said.
Captured materials such as computers or phones may detail Islamic State's financing schemes, communications methods, border-crossing routes and recruiting patterns, all of which al-Baghdadi will now have to scrap, said a U.S. intelligence official with knowledge of the assault.
"A lot of the information we pulled out of there could be very, very valuable -- the computers and other data that was recovered that's now being analyzed," Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said on NBC's Meet the Press.
Information for this article was contributed by Tim Arango, Omar al-Jawoshy, Falih Hassan and Eric Schmitt of The New York Times; by Sameer N. Yacoub, Maamoun Youssef, Jon Gambrell, Vivian Salama, Robert Burns and staff members of The Associated Press; by John Walcott, Tony Capaccio, David Lerman, Justin Sink, Dawn Kopecki and Donna Abu-Nasr of Bloomberg News; and by Hugh Naylor and Mustafa Salim of The Washington Post.
A Section on 05/18/2015