The fall of Ramadi and the criminality of US imperialism
20 May 2015
Nearly a year after the debacle suffered by US imperialism and the
regime it imposed during more than eight bloody years of war and
occupation of Iraq—the fall of the country’s second largest city, Mosul
to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—a similar collapse has
unfolded in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, Iraq’s largest province.
Attempts by the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon to
dismiss the events in Ramadi as a minor setback are either disingenuous
or delusional. As in Mosul, Iraq’s US-trained and armed regular army
largely melted away in the face of an offensive by the Islamist
guerrillas. And once again, it has left behind large stores of
US-supplied weaponry, ranging from dozens of armored cars and tanks to
artillery and other armaments and vast quantities of ammunition, all of
it now in ISIS hands.
Just as with Mosul, the fall of Ramadi has unleashed a new
humanitarian catastrophe on the war-ravaged people of Iraq, with
hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians killed and tens of thousands
turned into homeless refugees. Those who remain face the threat of
violence at the hands of ISIS as well as sectarian reprisals from the
Shiite militias that are massing for a bid to retake the city.
