Iraqi forces are unprepared to combat the Islamic State’s warfare style, which has delayed the effort to retake Ramadi from the terror army, a U.S. military spokesman said Thursday.
Col. Steve Warren, the Pentagon’s spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, told reporters that the Islamic State is fighting in a different way than terrorist groups did in Iraq in the early 2000s.
“This is not what we trained the Iraqi army in the early, middle 2000s to fight against,” Warren said from Iraq via video teleconference. “We trained and built a counterinsurgency. This is much more of a conventional fight.”
Ramadi fell into Islamic State control in May. While Iraqi officials promised the city would be back in Iraqi control within days, Iraqi forces have been in the early stages of retaking the city for months and environmental conditions, in addition to the enemy’s fighting tactic, have brought the fight to a “pause,” Warren said.
While ISIS has fortified Ramadi with roadside bombs, Warren said the terrorists are using them in a different way than troops saw during the Iraq war. U.S. troops encountered bombs that were “almost booby traps,” Warren said. The Islamic State, however, is using them more like land mines and creating conventional mine fields.
He described the Islamic State defense of Ramadi as “early 20th century-style in belts of defenses.”
The U.S. has tweaked the training of Iraqi forces to better prepare them for the this threat, Warren said, like how to clear a minefield.
“This is a specific skill and it’s not a skill the Iraqis have had to exercise before,” he said.
