Ramadi will be recaptured from Islamic State within days, Iraqi leader says

The Los Angeles Times – May 25, 2015 - Pro-government Iraqi forces will recapture the city of Ramadi from Islamic State militants within days, Iraq Prime Minister Haider Abadi told the BBC in an interview aired Monday.
Asked how long it would take to wrest the Anbar provincial capital back from the extremists, Abadi said: “I’m talking about days now.”
The Iraqi leader added: “It makes my heart bleed because we lost Ramadi. But I can assure you we can bring it back soon.”
Abadi also rejected comments from U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter to CNN that Iraqi forces “showed no will to fight” in Ramadi.
“I am sure he [Carter] was fed with the wrong information,” the Iraqi prime minister said of the U.S. defense chief’s scathing comments.
The loss last week of the strategic city of Ramadi was a major embarrassment for the government of Abadi, who took office last year with strong U.S. and international backing. A barrage of U.S.-led air strikes in and around the city didn’t avert Ramadi’s fall.
Video images of Iraqi forces in full-throttle withdrawal from Ramadi in Humvees as a much smaller militant force swept through the city rekindled memories of the battlefield debacle last June, when Iraqi troops retreated from the northern city of Mosul and elsewhere. Mosul, a city of more than 1 million, remains an Islamic State stronghold.
Analysts in Iraq and elsewhere have cautioned that an operation to retake Ramadi -- once a city of almost 500,000, though now largely depopulated -- could drag on for some time against well-entrenched militants adept at urban warfare and slowing down attackers with explosives planted in buildings and vehicles. It took a large pro-government Iraq force several weeks in March to recapture the smaller city of Tikrit, also a largely Sunni town. In Tikrit, as in Ramadi, loyalist fighters also greatly outnumbered Islamic State forces.