Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi says Baghdad has not requested a deployment of foreign soldiers and the sending of combat forces into its territory would be considered a “hostile act”. The official said Turkey has now sealed off its two main entry points from the terrorist group but said smuggling routes remain, and the U.S.is continuing to press Turkey to do more.
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It is Abadi’s strongest statement yet on the issue of ground combat forces, after he previously said that Iraq did not need them.
US officials believe this is the handiwork of Iran whose allies in Baghdad appear to be the ones leading the campaign to erode American influence in Iraq. The lawmakers responded by saying that Congress should be consulted before taking any kind of military action and some even said that the words and actions of the American government were not in sync.
US special operation forces will conduct operations in Iraq “at the invitation of the Iraqi government” and be in position “to conduct unilateral operations into Syria”, Carter said. “So we will not be doing anything in Iraq unilaterally”.
Carter discussed strategy and noted that U.S.-backed Kurdish forces had recently retaken the strategic town of Sinjar and cut off ISIS’s “main line of communication” between Raqqa, Syria and Mosul, Iraq, which are the two biggest cities still under their control.
“We are striking at Islamic State’s (ISIS) core in Iraq and in Syria, we are intensifying our support to local partners fighting ISIS on the ground, we are increasingly sinking our efforts to prevent foreign fighters from destroying our homelands”, he said. That is the exact same estimate for the Islamic State’s size that the US intelligence community provided sixteen months ago. Abadi would likely be notified before, or as, each raid is launched – but not sign off on a mission-by-mission basis.
Another key question is whether Baghdad will be brought into the picture on raids the United States conducts exclusively with Kurdish Peshmerga forces, given that the Kurds often insist on acting independently from the Iraqi military. Abadi’s remarks came a day after he said that Iraq has enough forces to defeat IS, an apparent response to a proposal by United States senators to triple the number of American forces in the country.
“If they stopped giving these statements and they do it with the government, they could send not just 100 – maybe 500 without anyone rejecting”, said Sami Askari, a senior lawmaker from Abadi’s State of Law coalition.
When the first 275 USA troops were sent to Iraq in June 2014, Pentagon spokesperson Rear Adm. John Kirby pledged that the deployment “will be of a limited duration” and be “a discrete, measured, temporary arrangement to help us to get eyes on the ground, to figure out what’s going on and get a better sense of it”.
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Washington recognises that Carter’s announcement could add to Abadi’s political difficulties, another US official said. He said that U.S. Special Ops troops “can only be deployed subject to the approval of the Iraqi Government and in coordination with the Iraqi forces and with full respect to Iraqi sovereignty”.
