Ed Royce: We need to arm the Sunni tribesmen and Kurds who are right now fighting the ISIS

Rep. Ed Royce, chairman of the House foreign affairs committee responded to a statement by the President when he said “if the Iraqis are not going to defend their country, we are not going to do that for them”, Mr. Royce said “it is true that Iraqis have to be willing and able to defend themselves and all Iraqi citizens. But at the same time we have to remember that we in the United States should be making certain that the Sunni tribes and Kurds have the weapons they need to actually fight ISIS.”
The chairman revealed that “those weapons are being held in Baghdad under a lot of pressure from their neighbor, the Iranian regime, who dese not allow the arming of the Kurd or the Sunni tribesmen who are defending Ramadi to have the equipment they needed.”
The chairman of the House foreign affairs committee also criticized the Obama administration of not doing enough even in air campaign. We weren’t there with the airstrikes that we were requested either. Little more than 2 a day average for what I saw over last couple of weeks of that air campaign. We don’t have any forward deployed personnel to assist on making certain those airstrikes hit those ISIS targets,” said Mr. Royce.
CNN brought up the frustration on the Capitol Hill that the administration isn’t taking the fall of Ramadi seriously, saying that John McCain, the chairman of the Senate arms services committee on the Senate floor was responding to Josh Ernest, the White House spokesman.
Josh Earnest had said: “… Are we going to light our hair on fire, every time there is a setback in the campaign against ISIL?”
John McCain responded angrily by saying: “In response to a slaughter in Ramadi the [administration’s] answer seems to be ’let’s not set our hair on fire.’” McCain asked, “Where is our morality? Where is our decency? Where is our concern about these thousands of people who are being slaughtered and displaced and their lives destroyed? And we shouldn’t set our hair on fire? Outrageous”, reacted McCain.
Rep. Ed Royce also reacted by saying: “I think they are treating it the same way, they are treating the setbacks in Syria and in war against ISIS right now as well. As ISIS continues to take towns and destroy antiquities… and massacring civilians, tribesmen in Ramadi who fought against ISIS, these Sunni tribesmen, and their children were slaughtered. Their wives were killed and … so my reaction to that is that we need more air support… and we need to force the issue of arming the Kurds and the Sunni tribesmen. I know that the Shiites don’t like that idea. But it is necessary to use what political capital we have to get that done, so they can defend themselves.
Rep. Ed Royce added that Baghdad representative in Anbar pulled out, retreated, but the Sunni tribesmen stayed and fought and died there. And the reality is more support forcing the issue of having a government in Baghdad that protects all of its citizens and recruits from the entire pool, instead of just trying to make the Shiite leaning government which leans toward Iran right now, happy. We need to do that. So I would make that point, we need to exert our considerable influence and get the weapons to the Kurds and the Sunni tribesmen that they need, and that is a serious issue. What we need on the ground in Iraq is, forward deployed spotters, special operation men in order to call in airstrikes, so that the airstrikes can be effective and would hit the ISIS targets. We have an army of 180,000 Kurds that have been trying for months and months to get the weaponry, the artillery, the mortars, the anti-tank missiles that have not been given to them in sufficient numbers to allow them to defend that 600 miles front against ISIS, and we have the same problem with respect to the Sunni tribes that are fighting ISIS.