Iraq Airlifting Volunteer Reinforcements Into Ramadi
In an effort to shore up the front line, Iraq is airlifting some 4,000 volunteer fighters to the embattled city of Ramadi, where they are intended to bolster government forces against the Sunni insurgency.
The Associated Press says:
"Around 2,500 of the volunteers arrived in Ramadi, located 70 miles west of the capital, on Friday and are to be joined by the remaining 1,500 on Saturday, said Gen. Rasheed Flayeh, the commander of operations in Anbar province. The men are being ferried out to Ramadi from Baghdad by helicopter, he added.
"The vast majority of volunteers are Shiites who have answered a call from the country's top Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to defend Iraq from the militants who have overrun of much of the country's north and west over the past month. The Sunni militant blitz is led by the Islamic State extremist group, which has unilaterally declared the establishment of an Islamic state ruled by Shariah law in the territory it controls straddling the Iraq-Syria border."