The real problem in Iraq
Over the weekend, as ISIS fighters rolled into Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar Province, one of them posted a video to the Internet. It was shot from a recently captured Iraqi police station, and showed box after box of American mortar shells and bullets that appeared shiny and new. Several Humvees, apparently not long […]Dexter Filkins writes for the New Yorker:
Over the weekend, as ISIS fighters rolled into Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar Province, one of them posted a video to the Internet. It was shot from a recently captured Iraqi police station, and showed box after box of American mortar shells and bullets that appeared shiny and new. Several Humvees, apparently not long out the packing crates, sat abandoned nearby. “This is how we get our weapons,” the narrator said in Arabic. “The Iraqi officials beg the Americans for weapons, and then they leave them here for us.”
Depressing, isn’t it? The fall of Ramadi is not just a bleak symbolic defeat for the Iraqi government and its allies, including the United States. During the nearly nine years that American troops fought in Iraq, Anbar Province was one of the most lethal places for American soldiers and Marines; some thirteen hundred died there. In 2008, though, when the Americans finally handed the city back to the Iraqi Army, many of the American Marines present at the ceremony there were not even carrying weapons. After so much bloodshed, Ramadi had become one of the safest cities in the country.
