Tom Bowman Inspirational Quotes (7)

There are a lot of car bombs and roadside bombs, house bombs, even, in this city planted by ISIS. So - but it's going to be a tough fight ahead, and the Iraqi generals expect to take the city back, the city of Ramadi, by mid-January.

Well, Ramadi is a provincial capital of Anbar province. It's a sprawling city west of Baghdad. It's a poor city, endless cinderblock houses and high-rises almost as far as the eye can see.

Absolutely, it's a Sunni area. So the key here, once Ramadi is taken that you have the Sunni tribal fighters, Sunni police in there patrolling the city.

The U.N. is asking Italy to oversee this effort. And if a government is formed, you're likely to see up to 5,000 Italian troops maybe go in to provide security and also train a Libyan army.

Well, at this point, it looks like the Iraqi forces are moving into the city center itself. Now they've been working on this for seven months now. The American military's been pushing them and encouraging them to really get into the city and rout ISIS. So now they're finally doing it.

American airstrikes have targeted ISIS in Libya before. Just last fall, another ISIS leader was killed. And I'm told there are several more training camps and we'll likely see more strikes in the coming weeks and months. So the U.S. is watching all this carefully and will strike what they call targets of opportunity whenever they can.

To the extent people can't solve a problem, they tend to ignore the problem.