Earnest announced administration plans for the U.S.to deploy a small number of special operations forces in an advisory role to Syria.
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“We’re not ruling anything out at this point”, the official said.
A senior administration official said this does not signal a change in USA strategy but an “intensification” of the campaign.
World powers and regional rivals are convening in Vienna to seek a solution to the four-year conflict in Syria that has escalated since Russian Federation intervened a month ago with an intense air campaign.
Earnest said a few efforts by the United States to combat the Islamic State, such as the scrapped rebel training program, have not been successful. So, the introduction of United States combat troops into Syria smells of desperation by the president who sees the U.S. getting kicked out of the Middle East and Russian Federation vastly increasing its influence in the region. So the U.S.is moving away from failed approaches, such as the effort to train Syrian rebels outside the country and send them back into Syria.
In a joint statement, participants said they have asked the United Nations to initiate talks between the Syrian government and the opposition to launch “a political process leading to credible, inclusive, non-sectarian governance, followed by a new constitution and elections”. There is no ground force that the USA can quickly train. “The core of our military strategy inside of Syria is to build up the capacity of local forces to take the fight to [the Islamic State] on the ground in their own country”. It is improbable that a handful of special operations forces would make a difference, he said, when there is no alternative to the Assad government “to rule a massive area the size of Great Britain” while “America has no credible partners in the region”.
Western news agencies quoted unidentified USA officials as saying earlier in the day that Washington would be sending additional aircraft, including F-15 fighters and A-10s, to Turkey’s Incirlik air base.
The American troops will help local Kurdish and Arab forces fighting ISIS, also known as ISIL, with logistics and are planning to bolster their efforts.
The Syrian Kurdish fighting force in northern Syria welcomed the decision, according to CNN.
The addition of up to 50 USA troops alone may not be enough to fundamentally change Syria’s increasingly messy civil conflict.
The USA personnel will travel from Irbil, Iraq, where they’re now stationed, to work with the Syrian Arab Coalition, a group that has its sights set on Raqqa, the ISIS stronghold, a US official tells NPR’s Tom Bowman. The White House also argued the president wasn’t backtracking on his commitment to keep US troops out of Syria because the presence was narrow in size and scope.
Although the number of commandos is small, it marks an escalation of USA involvement in the fight against Islamic State, which controls a large part of northern Syria and has its self-proclaimed capital in the Syrian city of Raqqah.
The officials were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly so spoke on condition of anonymity.
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It is believed the decision by the White House to send Special Forces into the war zone is meant to counter not only the caliphate but also Russia’s veiled assistance to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The raids would be conducted with the support of U.S. Special Operations forces backed with U.S.-supplied intelligence.
