Offered a chance by the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday to expand on the Pentagon’s cryptic outline of the force’s makeup and mission, Defense Secretary Ash Carter demurred.
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“Army troops and counter-terrorism forces launched simultaneous offensives from the northern and western fronts and succeeded in making a striking advance”, joint operations spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Rasool told Reuters.
Obama is under mounting pressure to escalate America’s military role in Iraq and Syria, particularly after the November 13 assaults in Paris that killed 130 people, claimed by Islamic State, and last week’s paramilitary-style attack in California by a couple believed by authorities to have been inspired by Islamist militancy.
Iraqi security forces inspect confiscated weapons that belonged to the Islamic State group fighters in Ramadi, Iraq, on December 10, 2015.
Ismail al-Mahlawi, the head of military operations in Anbar province, says his troops are preparing to push “toward the government complex and the Houz area”, in central Ramadi.
Despite this depletion of ISIS forces, U.S. …
Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst, said Carter’s comments came as a surprise because “for the last five years, the allies have been begging the U.S. to get more involved in Syria”.
That’s a strategy that the United States moved decisively toward in October, when it announced it would send dozens of special operations forces to Syria to coordinate with rebels.
He cautioned there is still a long battle ahead, and that the Warar River, a tributary of the Euphrates, separates the troops in Tamim from the centre of Ramadi.
He also said that the U.S. is prepared to deploy advisers and attack helicopters if requested by Iraq to help it “finish the job” of retaking the city of Ramadi from ISIL. “These things take time, Ramadi is a very hard environment”, he said, adding that it took US forces six months to “take and stabilize Ramadi” from al-Qaida, the Islamic State’s precursor.
On the other side of the Capitol, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed, by voice vote, a measure calling for the U.S.to cut through bureaucracy within the Iraqi government in Baghdad and get arms, training and medicine directly to Kurdish forces fighting IS.
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“That has not materialized among them”, Carter said.
