White House spokesman Josh Earnest announcing plans for the USA to deploy special operations forces in Syria, at the White House in Washington yesterday.
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Even as President Barack Obama sent U.S. troops back to Iraq and ordered the military to stay in Afghanistan, he insisted Syria would remain off limits for American ground forces. Now the president has crossed his own red line.
One senior official said that a first group of forces – possibly a couple of dozen – will go relatively soon to assess the situation and determine which groups on the ground the USA can best work with, including moderate Kurdish and Arab fighters.
In a move to redeem Syria from the Islamic State, US President Barrack Obama on Friday administered special troops to Syria to fight, assist and train combative forces opposing the ISIS, according to the White House.
The Obama administration’s new strategy may help ease Americans back into the realities of war, but regional experts as well as a few of Obama’s political allies say his slow ramp-up may be insufficient to defeat the fast-moving militants.
“Even as a Band-Aid, it has potential uses”, Hof said.
Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Obama’s home state of Hawaii, said the latest escalation “is unlikely to succeed in achieving our objective of defeating [Isis] and instead threatens to embroil the United States in Syria’s civil war”.
The military campaign against Islamic State is nowhere near the size and scope of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama repeatedly has used the costly and unpopular Iraq War as an example of what he’s tried to avoid.
But the significance of Friday’s announcement was more about the location of the deployment, not the number of troops.
For years, the president has said Syria was precisely the kind of situation he was elected to keep the US military from.
A man reacts as he mourns the death of his relative after missiles were fired by Syrian government forces on a busy marketplace in the Douma neighborhood of Damascus, Syria, October 30, 2015. Officials indicated the new mission would echo existing operations in Iraq, where military personnel coordinate local ground forces, channel weapons supplies and direct air support. What he could once describe as a civil war that needed to be solved by Syrians threatened to upend the whole region.
The SOF operators will stick in northern Syria, and will not take part in raids like their counterparts in Iraq have done, the official said, in part because USA forces have not worked as closely with the various Syrian rebel groups and do not have a relationship akin to that with the Iraqi security forces.
The decision to send USA troops to Syria comes a month after Russian Federation began launching airstrikes against insurgents in the country.
Russia’s foreign minister warned that the move increased the risk of a “proxy war” in the area and urged for greater cooperation between theirs and the U.S. forces in Syria.
He had also been under pressure by the Pentagon and global partners to make progress against Islamic State.
For over a year, the USA has led a 65-member coalition that has conducted air strikes against more than 13,000 IS targets in Iraq and Syria.
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These sources said that rebels equipped with TOWs are continuing to keep Assad’s forces in check despite Russia’s air bombardments and the bolstering of Assad’s ground forces by Russian advisors and Iranian militiamen.
