The Islamic State has gained ground in the Iraqi city of Beiji and the “Beiji refinery is threatened,” the Pentagon said Wednesday.
“The enemy does have control of some of the refinery now,” said Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren.
Iraqi security forces are at the refinery and the U.S. has conducted a series of airstrikes over the last few days to weaken the terrorist group’s position, but momentum currently “is flowing in the wrong direction,” Warren said.
Beiji is strategically important because “it’s an avenue of approach into Mosul,” Iraq’s second-largest city after Baghdad. The captured city of Mosul currently serves as the Islamic State’s headquarters. U.S. planners had initially announced a plan to use thousands of newly trained Iraqi security forces to take Mosul this spring but instead finds itself still finding significant resistance from the Islamic State in central Iraq.
In his most recent press conference with Pentagon reporters, outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey said Beiji was more strategically important than the western Iraqi city of Ramadi, prompting pushback from families of soldiers who had served or fallen there, and generating an apology from Dempsey.
