AFP, Baghdad :Iraqi forces and militias took up positions on the southern outskirts of Ramadi, officials said Wednesday, taking two neighbourhoods and moving into Anbar university.Army and police forces as well as allied paramilitaries clashed with fighters from the Islamic State group to take full control of Taesh and Humeyrah, an army colonel said.”Daesh was forced to flee after the clashes,” the officer said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.”Iraqi security and Hashed forces took control of both neighbourhoods. They also managed to enter the university but have yet to liberate it,” he said.Humeyrah, Taesh and the university are outside the main road circling the city from the south.Thousands of federal forces and Hashed al-Shaabi (“popular mobilisation” in Arabic) — an umbrella for mostly Shiite militias and volunteers — are closing in on Ramadi.IS fighters seized the capital of the western province of Anbar — Iraq’s largest — on May 17 after a three-day blitz that prompted a chaotic of the security forces.Raja al-Issawi, a provincial council member, confirmed the two neighbourhoods on the southern outskirts of the city had been retaken, describing their capture as “important to cut Daesh supplies”.Thousands of Iraqi forces are positioned a few kilometres east of Ramadi and others are clearing areas north of the city.On Sunday, US Secretary of Defence Ashton Carter criticised the Iraqi forces for their failure to defend Ramadi, noting that “they vastly outnumbered the opposing force. And yet they failed to fight; they withdrew from the site”.Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al Mutlaq told CNN on Monday evening that the army’s willingness to let Ramadi fall had surprised him too.”It’s not clear for us why such a unit, which was supposed to be trained by the Americans for years, and supposed to be one of the best units in the army, would withdraw from Ramadi in such a way?” he asked.But Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al Abadi disagreed. He told the BBC on Monday that he believed Secretary Carter was “fed with the wrong information.”And on Tuesday, both the White House and the State Department said that Mr Carter’s criticism focused on one particular incident, the fall of Ramadi last week, and it was not a general assessment of the Iraqi armed forces.”The Iraqis have suffered setbacks before and were able to retake territory from IS, such as in Baghdadi in western Anbar,” a senior White House official to reporters in Washington.
