This is what victory looks like in the Iraqi city of Ramadi: in the once thriving Haji Ziad Square, not a single structure still stands.
Turning in every direction yields a picture of devastation.
A building that housed a pool hall and ice cream shops - reduced to rubble. A row of money changers and motorcycle repair garages - obliterated, a giant bomb crater in its place. The square's Haji Ziad Restaurant, beloved for years by Ramadi residents for its grilled meats - flattened. The restaurant was so popular its owner built a larger, fancier branch across the street three years ago. That, too, is now a pile of concrete and twisted iron rods.
The destruction extends to nearly every part of Ramadi, once home to 1 million people and now virtually empty. A giant highway cloverleaf at the main entrance to the city is partially toppled.
Apartment block after apartment block has been crushed. Along a residential street, the walls of homes have been shredded away, exposing furniture and bedding. Graffiti on the few homes still standing warn of explosives inside.
When Iraqi government forces backed by US-led warplanes wrested this city from Islamic State militants after eight months of IS control, it was heralded as a major victory. But the cost of winning Ramadi has been the city itself.
The scope of the damage is beyond any of the other Iraqi cities recaptured so far from the jihadi group. Photographs provided to The Associated Press by satellite imagery and analytics company DigitalGlobe show more than 3000 buildings and nearly 400 roads and bridges were damaged or destroyed between May 2015, when Ramadi fell to IS, and January 22, after most of the fighting had ended. Over roughly the same period, nearly 800 civilians were killed in clashes, airstrikes and executions.
Now the few signs of life are the soldiers manning checkpoints, newly painted and decorated with brightly coloured plastic flowers. Vehicles pick their way around craters blocking roads as the dust from thousands of crushed buildings drifts over the landscape. Along one street, the only sign that houses ever existed there is a line of garden gates and clusters of fruit trees.
The wreckage was caused by IS-laid explosives and hundreds of airstrikes by the Iraqi military and the US-led coalition.
Besides the fighting itself, the Islamic State group is increasingly using a scorched earth strategy as it loses ground in Iraq. When IS fighters withdraw, they leave an empty prize, blowing up buildings and wiring thousands of others with explosives. The bombs are so costly and time-consuming to defuse that much of recently liberated Iraq is now unlivable.
"All they leave is rubble," said Major Mohammed Hussein, whose counterterrorism battalion was one of the first to move into Ramadi. "You can't do anything with rubble."
As a result, US-led coalition and Iraqi officials are rethinking their tactics as they battle IS to regain territory.
The coalition is scaling back its airstrikes in besieged urban areas and efforts are underway to increase training of explosive disposal teams.
The new approach is particularly key as Iraq and the coalition build up to the daunting task of retaking Mosul, Iraq's second-biggest city, held by IS for nearly two years.
"They know they can't just turn Mosul into a parking lot," said a Western diplomat in Baghdad who has been present for a number of meetings with coalition and Iraqi defence officials regarding the Mosul operation. The diplomat commented on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the press.
In January, after IS was pushed out of Ramadi, thousands of families returned to their homes. But residents have since been barred from coming back because dozens of civilians died from IS booby traps. Officials estimate IS planted thousands of IEDs, improvised explosive devices, across the city. Janus Global Operations, an American firm, began working to remove them last month and said it has so far cleared more than 1,000 square meters - a fraction of a city block.
The vast majority of the city's population remains displaced.
Share
