News / Foreign Policy

McCain: US must deploy thousands of troops to Iraq

Sunday, 24 May 2015 10:33 PM [ Last Update: Sunday, 24 May 2015 10:43 PM ]

John McCain, the chairman of the US Senate Armed Services Committee

John McCain, the chairman of the US Senate Armed Services Committee, says the United States must deploy thousands of troops to Iraq to defeat the ISIL terrorist group, which captured the Iraqi city of Ramadi last week.

McCain on Sunday said the Obama administration needs a more defined strategy to defeat the terrorist group and suggested "a number of thousands" of Americans could do the job.

“We need to have a strategy,” he said told CBS News. “There is no strategy, and anybody that says that there is, I’d like to hear what it is, because it certainly isn’t apparent now, and right now.”

Iraqi government forces walk in the Jurf al-Sakher area, some 50 kilometers south of Baghdad, to protect the area from further ISIL advancement, on May 24, 2015. (AFP photo)

McCain said Obama should adopt an aggressive strategy against ISIL similar to the one former President George W. Bush pursued during the Iraq war.

“We had it won, the surge had succeeded,” he said. “George W. Bush at least at the guts to reverse and sponsor the surge, which we eventually then succeeded. I wish, I pray, that Barack Obama would do the same thing.”

The ISIL terrorists, many of whom were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, now control large parts of Syria and neighboring Iraq.

An Iraqi girl, whose family fled the city of Ramadi after it was seized by the ISIL Takfiri group, looks on outside a tent at a camp housing displaced families on May 18, 2015 in Bzeibez, on the southwestern frontier of Baghdad with Anbar province. (AFP photo)

The northern and western parts of Iraq have been in chaos since ISIL started its campaign of terror in early June 2014.

The ISIL Takfiri group’s recent attacks on Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, have forced approximately 25,000 people to flee the city, the United Nations says.

According to an announcement on May 17 by Muhannad Haimour, the spokesman for the governor of Anbar, Ramadi has “fallen” to ISIL terrorists.

In a TV interview that aired on Sunday, US Defense Secretary Ash Carter accused Iraqi security forces of lacking the will to fight against ISIL.

US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter speaks to the media during a briefing at the Pentagon May 7, 2015 in Arlington, Virginia. (AFP photo)

Although Iraqi soldiers "vastly outnumbered" ISIL militants in Ramadi, but they quickly withdrew last week without putting up much resistance from the capital of Anbar province, Carter told CNN.

"What apparently happened was the Iraqi forces showed no will to fight. They were not outnumbered, and they vastly outnumbered the opposing force, and they failed to fight and withdrew from the site," he said.

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