Fighters of the Shia militia Asaib Ahl al-Haq (The League of the Righteous) stand guard outside their headquarters in Basra yesterday.

AFP/Baghdad

Shia militias converged on Ramadi yesterday to try to recapture it from militants who dealt the Iraqi government a stinging blow by overrunning the city in a deadly three-day blitz.
The loss of the capital of Iraq’s largest province was Baghdad’s worst military setback since it started clawing back territory from the Islamic State group late last year.
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi had been reluctant to deploy Shia militias to Anbar province for fear of alienating its overwhelmingly Sunni Arab population.  
He favoured developing locally recruited forces, a policy that had strong US support.
But militia commanders said yesterday Ramadi’s fall had shown the government could not do without the Popular Mobilisation units (Hashed al-Shaabi).
Badr militia chief Hadi al-Ameri, a senior figure in the Hashed who has been critical of the government’s policies in Anbar, went to Habbaniyah yesterday to discuss operations.
With the huge numbers and battle experience of the paramilitary groups, a counter-offensive was expected to start before IS can build up its defences.
The US-led coalition said it carried out 15 air strikes against IS in the Ramadi area in 48 hours.
Various militias announced they had units already in Anbar—including around Fallujah and Habbaniyah—ready to close in on Ramadi.
A spokesman for Ketaeb Hezbollah, a leading Shia paramilitary group, said it had units ready to join the Ramadi front from three directions.
“Tomorrow, God willing, these reinforcements will continue towards Anbar and Ramadi and the start of operations to cleanse the areas recently captured by Daesh will be announced,” Jaafar al-Husseini said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.
Asaib Ahl al-Haq, a group routinely accused of abuses, said it was discussing its deployment with the government.
“When it comes to readiness, we have more than 3,000 fighters waiting for a signal” from Asaib chief Sheikh Qais al-Khazali, spokesman Jawad al-Talabawi said.
The fall of Ramadi, some 100km west of Baghdad, came when beleaguered security forces pulled out of their last bases on Sunday.
The militants used waves of suicide bomb attacks involving cars, trucks and bulldozers to thrust into government-controlled neighbourhoods on Thursday and Friday.
The black IS flag was soon flying over the provincial headquarters and, with reinforcements slow to come, thousands of families fled.
Anbar officials said at least 500 people died in three days.
“We’re continuing to monitor reports of tough fighting in Ramadi and the situation remains fluid and contested,” Pentagon spokeswoman Maureen Schumann said late Sunday.
Tensions between Tehran and Washington, Baghdad’s two main foreign partners, also played out during the battle for executed dictator Saddam Hussain’s hometown of Tikrit, which the government took back last month.
Abadi met the head of US Central Command, General Lloyd Austin, on Sunday, and yesterday Iranian Defence Minister Hossein Dehghan arrived in Baghdad.
Hashed involvement was key in the recapture of Tikrit, but analysts had always warned Anbar would be a bigger task.
“Right now we’re dealing with the Sunni heartland... where the Sunni community has not completely rejected IS,” Ayham Kamel, director for the Middle East and North Africa at the Eurasia Group, said.
“It is not necessarily approval of IS, it could be fear or hedging, but they are not rising against IS,” he said.
IS yesterday released a video of celebrations in Mosul, Iraq’s second city and whose liberation from the militants now looks an ever more distant prospect.

Militants seize gas fields near Palmyra
The Islamic State group seized two gas fields yesterday northeast of Syria’s ancient Palmyra, a day after firing rockets into the city and killing five people, a monitor said.
The Al Hail and Arak gas fields, 40 and 25km respectively from Palmyra, were vital for the regime’s generation of electricity for areas under its control, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Fierce clashes have rocked Palmyra’s outskirts since IS launched an offensive on May 13 to capture the 2,000-year-old world heritage site nicknamed “the pearl of the desert”.
Since then, at least 364 people, including combatants from both sides and 62 civilians, have been killed in the battle for the ancient city.