Obama Gift-Wraps Hard-Won Ramadi To Islamic State Jihadists

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Investors Business Daily:

'The Cemetery of the Americans." That's what graffiti said in the western Iraq city of Ramadi when I first embedded there in 2006.

 

Indeed, my two journalist predecessors in Camp Corregidor were both shot by snipers. Within weeks, the first SEAL to die in Iraq would be killed, another mortally wounded. My own public affairs officer was killed, and later the first SEAL to win the Medal of Honor in Iraq would die there.

 

It was the hardest-fought battle of the war, but we won. That was then. This is now.

 

Now President Obama has handed the city back to terrorists, gift-wrapped. The fall of Ramadi "represented the biggest victory so far this year for the Islamic State," the New York Times correctly stated.

 

Ramadi is a city of vast importance, both strategic and symbolic. It's the city that al-Qaida in Iraq chose as its headquarters, and it became the most fiercely contested area in the country. It's why SEAL Team 3 of "American Sniper" fame was stationed there and became the most decorated SEAL unit since Vietnam.

 

Many experts consider the Battle of Ramadi and the "Anbar Awakening," engineered by Capt. Travis Patriquin, the actual turning point of the war. Patriquin — who a few months after briefing me on his brilliant plan was killed in Ramadi — got the Sunni chieftains to join the Americans and Iraqi security forces to defeat al-Qaida.