Iraq army now on offensive against Daesh in Ramadi: Mowaffak al-Rubaie

Press TV has conducted an interview with Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a former Iraqi security national adviser from Baghdad, to talk about the Iraqi army’s operation to wipe out Daesh terrorists from the city of Ramadi.

Below is a rough transcription of the interview:

Press TV: Talk to us about the final push by the Iraqi army to fully purge Ramadi of Daesh Takfiri terrorists and also about the significance of the gains made by the Iraqi army.

Al-Rubaie: It’s actually an operation we call the “mopping up” of Ramadi, what is left of these scattered individuals or small groups scattered here and there and they obviously left a large number of booby traps and houses being full of explosives and mosques being full of explosives, and schools, hospitals, as well as there are some sleeper cells that they left behind.

So the army is busy with doing this mopping up operation. Now unfortunately they managed to physically destroy probably 90 percent of the buildings in the city of Ramadi. There are no hospitals operational and there are no schools. Literally 90 percent of the buildings in the city of Ramadi have been destroyed by Daesh terrorists.

Now, if we compare this to the liberation of Tikrit, I believe Tikrit was much more successful and was with less probably material destruction, because 90 percent of Tikrit city was intact and is still intact and almost most of the internally displaced people from Tikrit have gone back to their houses and have been re-housed in the city of Tikrit while it will take a long, long, long time to re-house the internally displaced persons from Ramadi.

So it is going to be a huge civil military operation after the actual military operation and also is going to be… we will need a lot of cash to inject in the local economy to stimulate or generate the employment among young people and also to put in place local government as well and local police, and it is going to take a long, long time because it is basically going to be re-building, well not rebuilding an old city, but building a new city on top of the ruins Daesh has left in Ramadi.

So this is a really ugly scene when you see on firsthand what Daesh has left. The amount of destruction is unbelievable. I think they are trying to also do a counterattack and the counterattack yesterday, they managed to get six vehicles to blow out and some suicide bombers. Basically they wanted to boost the morale of their fighters which is now very low.

The beauty of the Iraqi liberation operation is that now we are on the offensive side while over the last months, we had been on the defensive side. We are on the offense.

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