The troops’ main focus will be advising Syria Arab and Kurdish forces who are expected to mount a military offensive on Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital in the region in the near future.
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The report said that there will be “fewer than 50” forces deployed to the region who will train, advise and assist certain vetted opposition groups.
“The mission has not changed”, said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary.
In addition to sending the Special Operations forces, Obama also said he was sending A-10 attack planes and F-15 fighter jets to Incirlik airbase in Turkey, where they will be able to support ground operations against the Islamic State.
Officials indicated the new mission would echo existing operations in Iraq, where military personnel coordinate local ground forces, channel weapons supplies and direct air support.
Neither the deployment of U.S. troops on the ground in Syria nor the bombing of the country from the air has ever been debated, much less approved, by the US Congress, and there is every indication that the launching of a new ground war in the Middle East is bitterly opposed by the vast majority of the American people.
“Rather”, he added, “it seems the administration is trying to avoid a disaster while the president runs out the clock”.
“We are going to continue to innovate, to build up what works”, he said. “We hope so. But that’s not the reason we’re doing it”.
The move reflects Obama’s growing dissatisfaction with the halting progress in Iraq and Syria and his commanders’ sense that the Islamic State has significant vulnerabilities that can be exploited. In just one month of air strikes, the Russian military has done far more damage to ISIS and other Islamist militias than the United States and its so-called coalition inflicted in the course of over a year.
The United States’ decision to send troops into Syria is an act of aggression because it does not have the government’s agreement, a Syrian member of parliament said Saturday.
Another USA official said that the administration hoped that the military push to defeat Islamic State and the effort to find a diplomatic solution to end Assad’s rule would over time be “mutually reinforcing”. “This is a unsafe place on the globe and they are at risk, and there’s no denying that”, said Earnest, who repeatedly rejected the idea that the deployment would constitute a ground combat mission, which Obama has long rejected as a solution in Syria.
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has staked his presidential campaign on his hawkish foreign policy views, called the decision to deploy Special Operations forces “an incremental change that will not change the conditions on the ground”. In the eyes of our allies this is unreliability. “You know, they’re all in for their agenda: the caliphate and their view of the world”. She has advocated a no-fly zone in the war-torn country.
The new US deployment into Syria essentially replaces that effort.
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Russian Federation has said that President Assad may be ready to deal, and why not? “But it doesn’t involve a full-scale USA invasion of Iraq”.
