نعى موالون للنظام السوري 208 مقاتلين في صفوف القوات النظامية المنسحبة من مستشفى جسر الشغور بريف إدلب الغربي، بعد محاصرة المستشفى من قبل تشكيلات المعارضة السورية المسلحة المنضوية ضمن غرفة عمليات "معركة النصر"، لمدة أربعة أسابيع، وإحكامها السيطرة عليه، يوم الجمعة.
وقالت مصادر ميدانية معارضة إن أعداد القتلى تقدّر بحوالي الـ250 مقاتلاً مع وجود عشرات الجثث بقبضتهم، بينما وثّق الموالون مقتل 208 جنود، بينهم 78 ضابطاً، بعضهم برتب رفيعة، ما يعد أعلى خسارة لقوات النظام منذ بداية حربها ضد الشعب السوري.
ومن أهم الرتب الرفيعة التي تمكنت المعارضة من قتلها أثناء عملية الانسحاب اللواء محيي الدين منصور، من مدينة صافيتا في محافظة طرطوس، والعمداء أكرم الخطيب من محافظة اللاذقية، وإبراهيم سعود من محافظة اللاذقية، وعلي تركي حسن من محافظة السويداء، وعلي قداحة من محافظة اللاذقية، وكمال ديب من محافظة طرطوس، ومحمد نعمان الصالح من حي الزهراء في محافظة حمص، ونضال إبراهيم من مدينة القرداحة في اللاذقية، ويوسف إسماعيل ضاهر من حي الزهراء أيضاً، وعبد الرزاق أبو خضر من بلدة الحفة الساحلية.
ومن بين القتلى كذلك المقدم أمجد إسماعيل من طرطوس، والعقيدين وجيه محمد كنجو من مصياف، ومحمد شحادة حيدر من جبلة.
وحاول النظام التغطية على خسارته لهذا العدد الكبير من الضباط والجنود بالحديث عن عملية انسحاب بطولية لعناصره من مستشفى جسر الشغور وتمكنهم من كسر الحصار المفروض على المستشفى.
On a spring afternoon in mid-March, a barrel bomb believed to have been laced with chlorine fell on a village in northern Syria. The gas made its way through a ventilation shaft, suffocating a family of three children, their parents and their grandmother.
“One of the children died in silence before we got to the hospital,” said Raed Saleh, the head of a Syrian civil defence force called the White Helmets. “We did what we could to save her, but dying in silence was her fate. Death in silence before the whole world.”
Saleh said it was the second chemical attack that night, an opening salvo in a campaign in which three-dozen such barrel bombs were dropped, according to medical and humanitarian workers, mostly on civilian targets in Idlib province, which fell to a coalition of rebel fighters in March.
Muhammad Tennari, the manager of Sarmin hospital, was there on that first night, and since then has treated the near-daily stream of victims with symptoms of chlorine exposure.
“The children who came to us were suffocating and we couldn’t do anything because they had breathed too much chlorine,” Tennari told the Guardian from Idlib, describing the most difficult cases he had to handle. “It’s very distressing to see children suffocating in front of you and you cannot do anything.”
Syrian civil defence workers and doctors have documented 35 barrel bomb attacks where chlorine was allegedly used since 16 March – the latest of which was on Tuesday near the former regime stronghold ofJisr al-Shughour – with more than 1,000 injuries and nine deaths. More than 20 civil defence workers have been wounded in rescue operations.
A victim of a chlorine attack holds an oxygen mask to his face at Sarmin hospital in a photograph taken by a Syrian civil defence group
“Whenever the regime loses an area or a city it arbitrarily takes revenge on civilians,” said Saleh. “It is targeting civilians.”
“Most of the targeting is of civilian areas, and most of the injured are women and children,” Tennari said. “It’s almost daily now.”Tennari said most of the victims came in without physical wounds, but had acute respiratory problems and burning, bloodshot eyes. Videos show medics pouring water on the victims after removing their clothes to reduce their skin’s exposure to the chemicals, before giving them oxygen masks and respiratory medication.
The vast majority of the attacks occurred in towns and villages in Idlib, and civil defence workers say they have run out of medicine to treat the symptoms of chlorine attacks.
The northern province has suffered from a punishing air campaign by Bashar al-Assad’s regime after most of it fell to rebels backed by Saudi Arabia and Turkey in late March. The rebels, known as Jaish al-Fatah, include conservative Islamists, mainstream Free Syrian Army battalions, and Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaida affiliate in Syria.
Footage obtained from social media claims to show victims of a gas attack in Syria being treated in hospital
Assad’s air force has launched more than 2,000 raids on Idlib since its capital city was taken by the rebels on 28 March, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The escalating air campaign has also coincided with the alleged intensified use of chlorine as a weapon, which is banned under the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention.
The chlorine campaign began just over a week after the UN security council passed a resolution under chapter 7 of the UN charter condemning its use. A fact-finding mission by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which is charged with destroying Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons, concluded that chlorine was used in 2014 in Syrian villages, but did not ascribe responsibility.
The Assad regime’s backers in the security council deny it is responsible for chlorine use, but the government is the only faction in the Syrian civil war with aeroplanes.
Saleh said: “This dithering in not referring the regime to the international criminal court gives it an opportunity to kill more civilians with these weapons.”
But the Obama administration, which once regarded chemical weapons as a red line, is unlikely to press Assad on the latest chlorine attacks. Though Obama said the US was assisting investigators who were looking into the chlorine allegations, he stunned observers at a press conference in Camp David by saying chlorine was not “historically listed as a chemical weapon”.
Video filmed by a civil defence group in Syria on 26 March this year purports to show victims of a chlorine gas attack being treated in Sarmin hospital
“It is true that we’ve seen reports about the use of chlorine in bombs that had the effect of chemical weapons,” Obama said. “Chlorine itself historically has not been listed as a chemical weapon but when it is used in this fashion can be considered a prohibited use of that particular chemical.”
Chlorine has many uses, but it was one of the first weaponised chemical agents used by Germany in the first world war, including at the battle of Ypres.
“Obama’s history on chlorine is wrong,” said Nadim Houry, Human Rights Watch’s deputy director for the Middle East and north Africa. “But the key issue is the present and the lack of steps that the US and Russia – the two architects of the chemical weapons deal in Syria – have taken to stop chlorine attacks in Syria. So far, Russia is refusing to even name the culprit, while the US condemns but otherwise tolerates Assad’s ongoing violation of global norms against chemical warfare.”
Houry said HRW is pushing for a mechanism to ascribe responsibility for the chlorine attacks and impose sanctions on the culprits, a step that has been resisted by Russia, which backs Assad.
Wissam Tarif, from the advocacy group Avaaz, which has campaigned for a humanitarian no-fly zone in Syria, said Obama’s statement amounted to a green light for the regime to continue its alleged chlorine campaign.
“Syrian regime forces have been raining down chlorine bombs on civilian neighbourhoods almost every day since Obama’s Camp David statement, and it is no coincidence,” said Tarif.
The Islamic State group’s takeover of Ramadi is evidence that Iraqi forces do not have the “will to fight”, the defense secretary, Ash Carter, said on Sunday, in the harshest assessment yet from a high-ranking Obama administration official of Iraqi fighters and the loss of the provincial capital.
Iraqi forces outnumbered their opposition in the capital of Anbar province but failed to fight and pulled back from the city in central Iraq, Carter said on CNN. The Iraqis left behind large numbers of US-supplied vehicles, including several tanks.
“What apparently happened is the Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight. They were not outnumbered,” Carter said. “In fact, they vastly outnumbered the opposing force. That says to me, and I think to most of us, that we have an issue with the will of the Iraqis to fight [Isis] and defend themselves.”
The fall of Ramadi last Sunday has sparked questions about the effectiveness of the Obama administration’s approach in Iraq, a blend of retraining and rebuilding the Iraqi army, prodding Baghdad to reconcile with the country’s Sunnis and bombing Isis targets from the air without committing American ground combat troops.
Carter defended the use of US air strikes as an effective part of the fight against Isis but said they are not a replacement for Iraqi forces willing to defend their country.
“We can participate in the defeat of [Isis],” he said. “But we can’t make Iraq … a decent place for people to live – we can’t sustain the victory, only the Iraqis can do that and, in particular in this case, the Sunni tribes to the west.”
The Pentagon this past week estimated that when Iraqi troops abandoned Ramadi, they left behind a half-dozen tanks, a similar number of artillery pieces, a larger number of armoured personnel carriers and about 100 wheeled vehicles like Humvees.
Over the past year defeated Iraq security forces have repeatedly left behind US-supplied military equipment, which the US has targeted in subsequent air strikes against Islamic State forces.
Carter did not discuss any new US tactics in the fight against Isis.
As Isis surges ahead and the Syrian regime teeters on the brink of collapse, our Middle East correspondent, winner of the 2015 Orwell prize for journalism, reports on the deadly struggle for dominance in the region A VERY GOOD REPORT
One evening at the end of March, a Syrian rebel leader returned from a meeting across the border in Turkey and called an urgent gathering of his commanders. The five men turned up at their boss’s house in Idlib province expecting to receive the same pleas for patience that they had always heard and more grim news about cash and weapons being hard to find. This time, though, they were in for a shock.
“He arrived looking eager,” said one of the commanders. “That caught our attention straight away. But when he started to speak, we were all stunned.”
The leader, who asked that his unit not be identified, said he told his men that the grinding war of attrition they had fought against the Syrian government since early 2012 was about to turn in their favour.
“And the reason for that was that I could now get nearly all the weapons I wanted,” he told the Observer. “For the first time they were not holding anything from us – except anti-aircraft missiles. The Turks and their friends wanted this over with.”
The leader says he explained that they and every other opposition group in the north, with the exception of Islamic State (Isis), were about to be beneficiaries of a detente between regional powers who had agreed to put their own rivalries aside and focus on a common enemy – the Syrian regime.
The agreement had been secured by Saudi Arabia, which had resolved to do all it could to end the Bashar al-Assad regime and, more important, to quash the ambitions of Assad’s main backer, Iran, to control the course of the war. It signified a new phase in an age-old tussle between regional rivals for power and influence that was to have profound ramifications for the way the war in Syria, and proxy standoffs elsewhere in the Middle East, were to be fought.
In early March, senior regional figures had been summoned to Riyadh by the newly crowned King Salman to hear his plans for the region. The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was one of the first to arrive. Qatari officials and Gulf Co-operation Council leaders soon followed.
Within weeks, the new push had paid clear dividends. Armed with dozens of guided TOW anti-tank missiles, which could take out regime armour from several miles away, opposition groups – among them al-Qaida’s affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, which is proscribed by the US as a terror group and has long been viewed warily by Riyadh – started advancing into towns and cities that they had not dared to attack until then.His message was threefold: first, there was to be no more division along regional lines, which had seen the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned governments of Turkey and Qatar pour support into allied Syrian groups, while Saudi focused on more mainstream outfits. Second, Riyadh would agree to send gamechanging weaponry to northern Syria in return for guarantees of coordination and discipline. And, finally, the US would not stand in the way. “Quite frankly,” a Saudi official told the Observer, “it would not have bothered us if they had tried to.”
The results were shocking. The regional capital of Idlib fell within days. Several weeks later, the nearby town of Jisr al-Shughour also fell to an amalgam of jihadists and moderates who had kept their end of the bargain.
Now, the agricultural plains that stretch towards Syria’s third and fourth cities, Homs and Hama, appear more vulnerable than at any time since mid-2012. So does the Mediterranean coast, and the mountains to the north, which are the heartland of the Alawite sect, dominant in Syria’s political and security establishment. And to the east, Aleppo, which had been under serious threat of being encircled by Assad’s forces six months ago, now looks much more likely to fall to the rebels.
In Ankara and Riyadh and even Baghdad and Beirut – both nominally Assad allies – there is now a strong sense that the war is going poorly for the regime. Every battle that its military has fought since March has ended in a rout, including the brief fight for two gas fields north of Palmyra last week, which fell to the jihadist group Isis, along with Palmyra itself – home to some of the world’s most important archeological sites.
Part of the ancient city of Palmyra. Photograph: CHRISTOPHE CHARON/AFP/Getty Images
Damascus sent some of its elite troops to defend the gas fields, which are an essential part of Syria’s energy supply, but they were quickly defeated by Isis, which also ran rampant through neighbouring Iraq’s Anbar province last weekend.
“This is not just the ebb and flow of battle,” said one senior diplomat from the Arab world. “This has been clear and repeated evidence that the regime army cannot defend itself, or the country, even with the ever-heavier backing of its sponsor, Iran.”
Across the border, Iraqi officials are expressing the same fears about their own national army. Better-armed and trained than the Syrians, Iraq’s best forces capitulated in Ramadi – the most important city in Anbar province – in about 72 hours, giving Isis its biggest triumph since it stormed into Mosul in July. The terrorist group’s stated intention then was to dismantle the post-Ottoman boundaries that have defined the modern Middle East, especially the Anglo-French Sykes-Picot agreement that created modern Syria and Lebanon. One year later, Isis could hardly be criticised for sounding overly ambitious.
On Friday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Isis was now in control of all six border crossings between Iraq and Syria – even with the constant presence of US air force jets. Nearly 1,000 miles of frontier is now out of the control of either country, with Isis enjoying complete freedom of movement, except when the warplanes are around.
Though 20 of its 43 top-tier officials have been picked off by US drones and jets, Isis leaders can still travel freely across the large tract of land, roughly the size of Jordan, that they now call an Islamic caliphate. And the key to their growth does not always rest with the brutal inflexible ideology that some leaders use to bring to heel the communities they conquer.
“Before the Islamic State came along, we were the animals of the Shias,” said a surgeon speaking from the Isis-controlled Iraqi city of Fallujah. “No matter what we said or believed, we were treated as Isis anyway,” he said of the Shia-led government. “Well, we may as well be with them, because the government will never come to help. They have more power and authority than Baghdad has had since Saddam.”
The surgeon’s views were echoed by residents of Deir Azzour in eastern Syria, who were contacted by phone. “I can see the appeal of Isis,” said one man who called himself Abu Ayman. “As much as I don’t like them, I can see that they are leading some Sunni communities towards a dignity that no government will give them.”
The spectacular successes of the jihadists last week has perhaps done more to demonstrate the weakness of the state actors they are fighting than to showcase their own strength.
“This is a big problem,” said Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi strategist and writer on Isis issues. “It is something that no state wants to talk about. They cannot acknowledge that they can’t find solutions by themselves. But it is very much an issue that the region is concerned about.”
As Baghdad was menaced by Isis last July, Iran was quicker than any other ally to send advisers to shore up its defences. They did not have to travel far. Nor did they need to start from scratch; Iranian generals had been doing precisely the same thing in Syria for at least two years.
One year on, Iran is more committed than ever before to securing both teetering states and safeguarding its own strategic goals in the Arab world.
The survival of the regimes in Baghdad and Damascus – or at least the same systems and structures in place now – are essential to the Iranian regime’s core goal in the Middle East: maintaining an arc of influence that runs from Tehran, through Qom, Baghdad, Najaf and Damascus and into southern Lebanon, where its proxy militia remains a potent threat to Israel’s northern border. Damascus has allowed weapons, money and fighters to flow to Hezbollah and, since 2003, Baghdad had also become an essential conduit for Iran’s ambitions, with Shia Iraqi groups who fought the occupying US army acting as paid-up proxies.
While Riyadh has watched uneasily as Iran has steadily gained a hand in Iraq since the US army fully withdrew in 2011, it has become far more alarmed as Syria has disintegrated. “That showed us how far they would go to defend their interests,” said the Saudi official. “They were not just defending what they had, but trying to build on it. And all the while under American cover.”
Throughout the Syrian war, and the Arab revolts more generally, the Saudi relationship with its most important global ally has withered significantly. King Salman, who was formerly defence minister, is known to have railed against Barack Obama’s equivocation on Syria, especially his decision not to bomb Damascus in August 2013, after a sarin gas attack blamed on the Syrian regime. “That was the moment when we realised that our most powerful friend was no longer reliable,” the official said. “We had to step out from behind the curtain.”
Within weeks of Salman being named king, a more assertive regional policy was evident. So, too, was a willingness to openly defy the US, a stance borne out of deep resentment at a deal brokered by Obama to compel Iran to surrender its nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief and, according to officials in Riyadh and the GCC, the global legitimisation of Iran 36 years after the Islamic revolution.
Gulf officials contacted in recent weeks say fears that Iran will end up playing a lead role in resolving the region’s most intractable disputes will never sit well with them, or with Riyadh. All insisted that the March takeover of Yemen by Houthis from the Shia-linked Zaydi sect, who are allied to Iran, was evidence of Tehran asserting itself ahead of the talks. And in a place where it most matters to Riyadh – Saudi Arabia’s eastern border.
“They will spend their whole treasury to protect what they have,” said the official. “They are very open about it. The Revolutionary Guards say they will never compromise on Damascus and Hezbollah and they are the most powerful institution in the country. And now they want Yemen too. But this is a ploy. They will try to trade that with us in return for Damascus.”
Out of all the recent chaos – the looming destruction of a cradle of civilisation, resurgent anti-Assad fighters and the unchecked brutality of the jihadists – a rare clarity has emerged. The region’s main powers are now openly locked in a struggle for the destiny of the region – and of Syria in particular – that can only be stopped with a globally brokered solution.
“Iran said the key to the Arab world was Syria,” said the Saudi official. “Well, we agree with them.” And Riyadh is no longer worried about showing it.
BAGHDAD — It was around 9 p.m. when police Col. Hamid Shandoukh peered across the dark waters of the Euphrates River and spotted the skiffs carrying Islamic State fighters toward his front line in the city of Ramadi.
The commander mustered his forces — a mixture of tribal fighters and local policemen — to defend their position on the river snaking through the city.
But it soon became clear that this was no ordinary assault. As the security forces trained their guns on the river in front of them, they came under attack from behind.
“It was a case of complete chaos,” Shandoukh said. “We thought the areas behind us were secured.” But the Islamic State had activated sleeper cells in the city.
The attack in the Albualwan neighborhood on May 14 marked the beginning of the end for pro-government forces in Ramadi, a strategic city that had held out during nearly 18 months of assaults by the Islamic State. The insurgents launched a sophisticated, multipronged attack over four days, using as many as 30 car bombs.
But new accounts from fighters in the city indicate that the fall of Ramadi owed as much to the weakness of Iraq’s forces and holes in U.S. strategy as to the Islamic State’s strength.
Soldiers described confusion and a lack of coordination between branches of the security forces as chains of command broke down.
Even Iraq’s Golden Division — a U.S.-trained special-forces unit considered the most capable in the country — suddenly deserted its positions, security officials said.
Planes from the U.S.-led coalition bombed the edges of Ramadi, but there simply weren’t enough airstrikes, Iraqi military officials said.
Tribal fighters complained that as the city came under attack, they were still scraping together money to buy ammunition on the black market, despite the fact that train-and-equip programs for local Sunni tribal forces were a cornerstone of the U.S. strategy to confront the extremist group.
The Islamic State fighters shocked Iraqi security forces with their coordinated assault. After taking over Albualwan on Thursday night, the militants seized the nearby Jamia area. Other attacks were launched from the al Soufiya and al Hoz neighborhoods. Some members of the sleeper cells were dressed in police uniforms, confusing the pro-government fighters.
Displaced Sunni people, who fled the violence in the city of Ramadi, arrive at the outskirts of Baghdad, May 19. (Stringer/Iraq/Reuters)
The extremists made steady gains against fighters who were war-weary and lacking supplies. Army units were stretched thin.
By Friday afternoon, the Islamic State had hoisted its black flag over the city’s government compound and surrounded the city’s military headquarters.
The militants detonated 17 vehicle bombs that day, according to Ramadi’s governor, Sohaib Alrawi. Bombers sped toward their targets in dump trucks and bulldozers armored with thick steel plating, which protected them from gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades.
During the ferocious attacks Friday and Saturday morning, planes from the U.S. coalition carried out just four strikes in the area, according to media releases, with seven more over the following 24 hours.
“There were only weak, shy airstrikes on the edges of the city,” said Sabah Karhout, the head of Anbar’s provincial council.
President Obama in an interview published last week attributed the loss of Ramadi to shortcomings in training and developing Iraq security forces.
Pentagon officials have said that Iraqi forces withdrew from Ramadi in part because they mistakenly assumed that the U.S.-led coalition could not launch airstrikes during a sandstorm. “The weather did not impact our ability to conduct airstrikes,” Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren told reporters on Thursday. Residents and fighters in the city said the weather was largely clear after the initial attack on Thursday, which occurred during a light dust storm. That dust, however, may have allowed the Islamic State fighters to position themselves before the assault, undetected by aerial surveillance.
Reluctant to be drawn into a combat role, the Obama administration has held back from deploying spotters on the ground to relay real-time information to nearby attack aircraft, limiting the capabilities of strikes.
‘There was chaos’
As the fall of Ramadi appeared imminent, the Iraqi government tried to push back the Islamic State fighters from the largely Sunni city, where authorities had refrained from deploying Shiite militiamen who have led the battle elsewhere.
On Saturday evening, a column of 30 federal police armored vehicles arrived in Ramadi. Around noon on Sunday, the convoy attempted to head for the government compound, where some police forces were still stranded. But on reaching the turquoise-domed Al Dawlah al-Kabir mosque in the city center, the vehicles came under heavy attack and turned back, fighters said.
“When the forces who were meant to reinforce us retreated, our morale was completely broken,” said Omar Shehan al-Alawni, a tribal fighter in the area.
Another turning point in the battle was the withdrawal of Iraq’s Golden Division.
Maj. Omar Kamis al-Dahl, a 31-year-old policeman, said he had withdrawn to Street 60, a major thoroughfare where he expected to see special forces fighters from the Golden Division.
“We were surprised to find Daesh instead,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS or ISIL.
Fadhil Jalil al-Barwari, the head of Iraq’s special forces, had withdrawn from the city with a group of his men that morning, according to a senior security official who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject.
“When Barwari retreated with that group, there was chaos, everyone else retreated without an order, ” the security official said.
Barwari declined to comment on the Ramadi withdrawal on Friday, but earlier told Iraq’s Sumaria News that it was “tactical.”
With the counterterrorism troops suddenly pulling out, the limited forces left in the city began collapsing, Karhout said.
“There was no central leadership, no leaders coordinating these forces on the ground,” he said.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has ordered an investigation into the causes of the military failure. Ten of the suicide bombings that occurred during the assault had the power of an “Oklahoma City-type attack,” a senior State Department official told reporters in the District, referring to the truck-bomb explosion in 1995 that killed 168 people. But Iraqi officials said the bombings were no more powerful than they experience on a weekly basis — though there were more of them.
The battle also highlighted the animosity and lack of trust between the army and the local police.
Police complained that soldiers at checkpoints confiscated their weapons in the confusion, saying they weren’t allowed to retreat from the city with them, even though officers said they were moving from one neighborhood to another.
“There is so much distrust,” said Dahl. “They consider anyone from Ramadi as a sympathizer with ISIS. And then in many of their operations, Daesh dress in military clothes, so we don’t trust people we see in army uniform.”
As the city’s defenses collapsed,around 1,000 men were besieged in the military headquarters, the Anbar Operations Center, under heavy mortar and rocket fire from insurgents.
An armored forklift pushed away blast walls on the edge of the base, allowing suicide bombers to penetrate, fighters said. At least four powerful explosions rocked the base, one from an explosives-rigged, steel-covered truck which hurtled inside, detonating and killing scores of people.
“Before the attack we obeyed our commanders’ orders, but after the attack, when it came to retreating, we disagreed” with senior officers, who wanted the forces to wait for reinforcements, said a captain with federal police forces on the base.
“We said, ‘Whether you want to or not, we are going to retreat,’ and eventually they came with us,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity
The security forces broke through the siege but left wounded colleagues behind, fighters said. A total of 286 local policemen died in the battle, the governor said, adding that figures were not available for other branches of the security forces.
Islamic State fighters crowed about their victory on social media, releasing images of the weapons and crateloads of ammunition they had seized. Millions of dollars worth of U.S.-supplied military equipment appeared to be left behind, including dozens of tanks and armored vehicles.
For Dahl and other local fighters it was particularly galling to see photos distributed on social media of stashes of ammunition, when they had struggled to get bullets.
“The sons of Ramadi were fighting for their city,” he said. “All they wanted was ammunition.”
