While local and international attention is focused on Iraq's northern Kurdish region, the Islamic State group has made important advances towards the capital of Anbar province, residents and local Iraqi officials said.
The group has taken control of most cities and towns in Anbar province, about 100km to the west of Baghdad, over the last eight months, but gaining control over the final parts of the city of Ramadi would put the entire Sunni province in its hands.
"Ramadi now is totally surrounded by the militants. The insurgents are nibbling the areas, one by one, like a scorpion. They are crawling towards the centre of Ramadi," said a senior local official, who spoke to Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity.
"Everyone in Baghdad is busy, either with the formation of the new government or the fighting in Mosul and Tikrit, and this has generated a state of inaction among the troops in Ramadi," the official said.
Iraqi troops are scattered across military bases in the vast desert of Anbar province, and stationed at the centre of Ramadi and the nearby town of Haditha. But Iraqi security officials said most troops are insufficiently trained and under-equipped to engage in fighting against Islamic State fighters.
"Our regular troops which are deployed now in Anbar are not trained to be involved in guerilla fighting. They are able to [hold their positions on] the ground and defend themselves, no more," said a security adviser to outgoing Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"Ramadi is a strategic city for us, but we do not have enough elite troops to achieve a victory there. So we withdrew a third of the troops from there and redeployed them around Baghdad," the adviser said. The adviser told Al Jazeera that maintaining control over Ramadi is a "non-urgent" priority for the Iraqi government at this time.
The Islamic State group has swept through northern Iraq since it took control of Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, in June. Islamic State fighters routed Kurdish Peshmerga troops from towns that bordered the northern Kurdish autonomous region, and at least 500,000 people have been displaced.
But fighters affiliated with the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the precursor to the Islamic State group, took control of Fallujah and Karma at the start of the year. In May, backed by several local tribes, the fighters seized most of the towns along the Euphrates River. The group has seized new areas in the Ramadi suburbs over the last few days, including al-Taamiem, al-Bujassim, and al-Buthiyab, according to local officials and residents.
The group's rapid advance has alarmed Baghdad, and prompted US air strikes against the Islamic State group in Iraq. Ahmed Khalaf al-Dulaimi, the governor of Anbar province, recently told Reuters news agency that he asked for, and secured, US air support to battle Islamic State fighters.
US involvement in Anbar is a sensitive issue, however, given the bloody history of US military intervention in the province after its 2003 invasion. "Any US intervention in Anbar would be seen by [the] Sunni people... as direct military support for the federal Shia-led government in Baghdad against them," said Hashim al-Habobi, an independent Iraqi political analyst.
"For Sunni people, Americans are not welcomed in the Sunni areas as they are seen as occupiers," Habobi said. "[But if] Anbar falls into the hands of [Islamic State] militants ... the next battle will be on the western border of Baghdad."
(Aljazeera)
