neighbor. iran iran is the one that they say is providing them with the advisers on the ground on these front lines. when he did see that we weren t allowed to speak to iranian advisers. iran is providing them quickly with the weaponry that they need. so it s a very complicated situation right now. there are these multiple front lines that are emerging but it seems that the strategy at this stage is to block off isil with supply routes retake territory and with anbar to prepare for the advance into ramadi. and to do that arwa without stoking any big sectarian divide at the same time? reporter: exactly. and that s going to be really be key in all of this. because at the tip of this sphere you do have this iranian-backed shia paramilitary units and, yes in some areas, the sunni prescribetribes are involved but they don t have the weapon that they need.
campaign. sure. that is the kind of fate that awaits you. that s a pretty bad combination. so isis is winning the psychological war is that right? i would say so. i mean just the proof is in the pudding. they ve lost some. they lost tikrit. they got ramadi which is a bigger deal. and they were so outnumbered, isis was. we re not talking about the iraqi forces. they have the forces right? they ve been trained. is the training good enough or the resources good enough because we hear the defense secretary saying we re going to expedite sending more resources. the way we typically have looked at time since the isis advanced last summer is through the lens of day ss are or weeks. if you look at time in classic insurgencies a decade or more. so for example we re talking about the fall of ramadi last week. now we re talking about militias going back and potentially retaking it over the course of the next few weeks. i think over the course of the next six, eight months isis made ad
neither they nor anything we do can substitute for the iraqi forces will to fight. they re the ones who have to beat isil and then keep them beaten. reporter: now, look carter chose his words very carefully. top commanders here at the pentagon have received information on what happened in ramadi. they re well aware of the assessment on the ground there. there is more to it than that. why did this happen? why did the iraqi forces not fight? some of the factors involved they hadn t been paid in a long time. they hadn t been home to see their familiar possibly in weeks. some of them exhausted, running out of ammunition and one of the big problems that s emerging in the view of the u.s. is the iraqi military leadership that they simply are not up to par, that these iraqi military leaders in the view of many at the pentagon need to do a much
iraqi soldier during the fall of ramadi. it was fascinating. this was right before they pulled back. he said that they were there. they were trying to fight and then there was no more ammunition. they were surrounded on all sides. they were supposed to be supported from the rear by are another unit and then they turned out not to be there. he came out of the fight, talked to our arwa damon and said the leadership is bad they re not having a good go of it. when you look at the problem here and it seems boiled down because of what the defense secretary said it s very complex, right, the different things going on here. yeah, i mean, i would add to that the cost of staying around when isis takes over the area you re in. we know what they are. they just killed 200 civilians. they ve gone house to house in other cities that they ve taken looking for people who work with the government who are asoes associated with the army. when you have leader shipship and the cost of remaining behind you
single person maybe more than one, but possibly one person possibly upsetting travel for so many millions of people brianna. oh, so inconvenient on a day like today. tom foreman, thank you so much. now to the war against isis and tough new comments by defense secretary ashton carter say that go iraqi forces showed no will to fight, to hold on to the key city of ramadi. our pentagon correspondent barbara starr conducted that exclusive interview. she joins us now. strong reaction to this all around the world, right? reporter: it is gettinging a lot of attention, brianna. and suddenly one of ash carter s backers is the prime minister in iraq a sunni, obviously a member of the opposition coming out today saying that he thought the army did not perform very well in ramadi. whatever did or did not happen in ramadi all of this setting off global controversy. a chaotic firefight just before