Al-Alwani, who lost a son two months ago in fighting against the IS group in the Al Bu Farraj area, blames the Iraqi government and the Iraqi army for the city’s fall. “The government didn’t give the local tribes the kinds of serious weaponry needed for them to assist the Iraqi army here,” he complains.
Within hours of taking control of Ramadi the IS group was up to its usual tricks: imprisoning or executing those they saw as enemies in the city, releasing prisoners and inviting them to join its ranks and beginning to build fortifications inside Ramadi in preparation for a counter-attack.
One senior Iraqi intelligence officer, who couldn’t be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak on the subject, told NIQASH that the IS group’s fighters seemed to be particularly motivated by a new speech by the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
“We have information that after the news of al-Baghdadi’s injury surfaced, there were conflicts between the group’s leaders,” the intelligence officer said. There had been disagreements between local fighters and foreign fighters as to who would take al-Baghdadi’s place at the top. However these seemed to evaporate as soon as al-Baghdadi reappeared and focus went back onto the fighting, the officer reported.
The fall of Ramadi resulted in significant security and political developments. Firstly the fall of the city saw tensions between the Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and the unofficial Shiite Muslim militias, that have played an important role in the fight against the IS group, ease.
Relationships between the two had been deteriorating for several weeks after al-Abadi asked the Shiite Muslim militias to withdraw from fighting for fear of alienating the Sunni population, and because some militias had been seen looting and committing acts of revenge, and even murder.
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