Jessica Lewis, Ahmed Ali, and Sinan Adnan
December 27, 2014
ISIS Offensives in Ramadi City and Al-Asad Airbase in Al-Anbar, Iraq
The contest for Ramadi, the capital city of Anbar province in western Iraq, is reaching a critical juncture. ISIS is now launching attacks upon the Anbar Operations Command headquarters, the 8th Iraqi Army Brigade headquarters, and the government complex in the center of the city as of December 2014. Anti-ISIS forces, including the Iraqi Security Forces and tribal fighters, are concentrated there. The fall of these locations to ISIS would mean the effective fall of Ramadi, a major objective for ISIS as key terrain on the Euphrates River and the home of the Anbar Awakening. ISIS has reinforced its Anbar operations from its bases in Syria, and is maneuvering an armored convoy toward Al-Asad Airbase. Coalition forces have been engaging in numerous airstrikes against ISIS in order to protect this vital city and base, which protects American as well as Iraqi Forces.
The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), along with other insurgent groups, has contested control of Ramadi since January 2014 when the Iraqi military withdrew from major urban centers in Anbar. ISIS gained full control of Fallujah, but never succeeded in controlling Ramadi. Since then, the Iraqi Army (IA), Iraqi Police (IP), and anti-ISIS tribal fighters have clashed with ISIS in Ramadi, and cycles of violence have continued in the city almost without interruption. Ramadi is the capital of Anbar and representative of the enduring control of the state within the Sunni heartland of Iraq. Its defense demonstrates successful cooperation between ISF units and Sunni tribal militias. Ramadi is also therefore an enduring objective of ISIS, in order to break this relationship, seize territory from the state, and consolidate its own physical space for its Caliphate. The ISIS offensive to establish complete control of the Euphrates River Valley is therefore still underway, with Ramadi as its principal objective. But the campaign to defend Ramadi is also escalating, with promise to deny this key terrain to ISIS in the long term.
As of December 23, the ISF and tribal militias have succeeded in preventing ISIS from breaching the fortified defenses of the Ramadi government complex, the Anbar Operations Command (AOC), and 8th IA Brigade headquarters. ISIS established control of adjacent neighborhoods in November 2014, and ISIS has launched attacks into the city’s main fortifications several times over the last six weeks. At the present time, ISIS controls several Ramadi neighborhoods proximate to these key locations inside the city center. But the city’s primary defenses are holding, and the ISF still maintains critical ground lines of communication into the city center. The fight for Ramadi is nevertheless tied to the broader fight for Anbar, in which ISIS is leveraging freedom of movement in the desert to maneuver past ISF defenses. Lack of progress in Ramadi may cause ISIS to project greater force in Haditha and Baghdadi in western Anbar in order to split the attention of the ISF. Baghdadi village is immediately adjacent to the strategic Al-Asad airbase in central Anbar province, and the integrity of the base is the lynchpin of ISF’s Anbar campaign. The ISF campaign for Ramadi must therefore hold Haditha and Al-Asad airbase while the Ramadi campaign neutralizes ISIS in that zone in order to exploit a widening gap in ISIS control and prevent ISIS from reestablishing itself in central Anbar.
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