Pentagon leaders said Monday that they expect the U.S. to do more in the fight to retake Mosul than it did in Ramadi.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter said the U.S. military will do more of the types of things it did to help retake Ramadi, such as airstrikes, training and advising, as well as provide additional capabilities, like logistics and bridging.
“We fully expect to be doing more and differing in both scale and the kind of things that we’re doing,” Carter said during his first joint press conference with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Joseph Dunford, who took over as the military’s top uniformed officer almost five months ago.
Mosul fell into the control of the Islamic State in June 2014. The Pentagon announced an offensive in spring 2015 to retake the large urban area, which never materialized almost a year later.
Dunford said operations to isolate Mosul have already begun, but could not give a timeline of when the city would be secure when asked if it would be sometime in 2016. He did say that it is nothing that would happen “in the deep, deep future.”
“I think we would do more in Mosul than Ramadi just because of the order of magnitude of the operation in Mosul would indicate to me that we would have more U.S. support in Mosul than we did in Ramadi,” Dunford said. “And I will certainly defer to make those recommendations to the secretary sometime in the near future.”
Dunford also said the Pentagon would take “lessons learned” from Ramadi to update its tactics for Mosul.
Iraqi forces regained control of Ramadi late last year after months of operations and coalition airstrikes. The U.S. offered to provide Apache helicopters for the final push to drive the Islamic State out of the city, but the Iraqi government declined the help.
