And two days after Ramadi fell, al-Abadi met with al-Jibouri. The two politicians agreed that the Shiite militias should be allowed to enter Ramadi and fight against the IS group. Al-Jibouri has said that the Iraqi Parliament will also announce an official decision on the matter after this recess.
In a private meeting in Baghdad that media were not privy to, members of the Anbar provincial council also voted on whether they should allow the Shiite militias to enter Ramadi. The council members concluded that they had no other option – the government security forces did not seem capable of defending the city and the militias now appear to be the strongest military force in the country.
Now there remains only one problem: the conditions that some of the Shiite militias, especially those who appear to have closer ties to Iran than to the Iraqi government, will impose if they are to go back to fighting. The leaders of these kinds of militias – including Hezbollah in Iraq, the League of the Righteous and the Badr Brigades – had been having an increasingly testy relationship with al-Abadi. Now they’re in a more powerful position and more likely to get their way on requests like immunity from prosecution during this crisis.
Currently the militias seem to be on stand by. They have started to call upon all their members to join their units as soon as possible. There are also reports of secret meetings taking place, bringing together Iraqi officials, US officials and the leaders of the Shiite militias. If what seems to be happening really is – that is, the meetings are being held to draw up battle plans and coordinate different parties in the fighting – this could be the first time that the US cooperates openly with the Shiite militias in the ongoing fight against the IS group.
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