The White House announced on Friday that US President Barack Obama had authorized the first sustained deployment of special forces to Syria, reversing a long-standing refusal to put U.S. boots on the ground.
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“Deploying a handful of US special operations forces to Syria will not change this situation significantly”, said Frederic Hof, Obama’s former Syria special adviser. Those United States troops “do not have a combat mission” and their major task is to build capacity of local moderate opposition forces fighting the IS militants by offering a few training and advising assistance, the spokesman said.
Another seeming knee-jerk response came from Turkey and rightwing politicians and pundits in the USA which revived talks about the creation of safe havens in northern Syria, ostensibly to protect civilian refugees, but also tacitly and more importantly, to give cover to rebel groups from Russian air strikes and Syrian government ground troops.
Today, as Islamic State controls a part of Syria and is proving resistant to the thousands of coalition air strikes, US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday that the move to deploy USA commandoes was “not a decision to enter into Syria’s civil war”.
“We are not putting USA troops on the front lines fighting firefights with ISIL”, said Obama during an interview with NBC’s “Nightly News”.
To date, more than 700 fighters from Indonesia and 200 from Malaysia have made their way to participate in the violence in the region, a critical mass that prompted ISIS to form a dedicated South-east Asian military unit, Katibah Nusantara.
Any action that increases US military pressure on the terrorist entity is welcome, but the steps Mr.Obama approved are incremental and underpowered.
Warren said the United States meant to “reinforce” the action, seeming to hint at further ammunition air drops to US-allied groups after those that took place last month. A US program to train Syrians was abandoned as a failure, and the new deployment essentially would replace that program. Bush applauded Obama for deciding to deploy special forces, but said “we can’t get into a quagmire”.
“There should be a real strategy to take out Isis and to take out Assad”, Bush said, referring to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“I am also very concerned that we are sliding deeper into yet another war in the Middle East with no limitations on time, geographic scope and cost”, Udall added.
“These forces do not have a combat mission”, said White House spokesman Josh Earnest.
A U.S.-led coalition has been targeting the Islamic State group with airstrikes since September 2014, killing 12,000 extremists without weakening the group.
Earnest said that Obama sees no “military solution to the problems that are plaguing Iraq and Syria – [the solution] is a diplomatic one”. I’ve been consistent throughout that we are not going to be fighting like we did in Iraq [in 2003] with battalions and occupations.
This is the context in which to interpret the latest, surprise move by Obama to send Special Forces into Syria.
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The new USA deployment into Syria essentially replaces that effort.
