Carter met the Kurdistan region’s President Massoud Barzani, a veteran guerrilla leader who fought Saddam Hussein for decades.
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Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said the U.S. seeks a lasting victory against Islamic State and divulged the “secret sauce” to making it happen in Irbil.
Carter noted that some parts of Iraq’s security forces were just as capable as the peshmerga, as well as some Kurdish forces in Syria. While in Iraq, Carter met with Kurdish regional government president, Masoud Barzani.
Speaking to reporters ahead of his trip, Carter branded Kurdish forces “a powerful and successful ground force”.
Several high-ranking Kurdish military officials attended the talks in the Kurdish capital Arbil with Carter, on his first trip to Iraq since taking office earlier this year.
The threat posed to Arbil by an IS advance in early August 2014 was one of the reasons cited by US President Barack Obama for announcing the US air strikes days later. It came despite a daily campaign of U.S.-led coalition air strikes meant to bolster Iraqi forces on the ground.
The Islamic State takeover of much of northern Iraq last year, including the city of Mosul, triggered a Kurdish push south and west to take control of the disputed city of Kirkuk, which is key to Iraq’s northern oil fields.
The coalition has repeatedly stressed that air strikes were only useful if carried out in support of well-organised ground offensives.
“He emphasized the importance of building an inclusive government and strengthening the Iraqi security forces”, he added.
“We have an issue with the will of the Iraqis to fight ISIL and defend themselves”, he had said at the time, using another acronym for IS. Currently, about 3,500 U.S. military personnel are training Iraqi troops.
The government has instead focused on Anbar, the vast western province that stretches from the Syrian, Saudi and Jordan borders all the way to the outskirts of Baghdad.
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His visit came as Iraqi troops, some of which were trained by the United States, tightened the noose on IS in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province which the government lost in May.
