However, the USA has conducted special operations raids into Syria before now and will continue to do more unilateral raids, similar to the one by Delta Force commandos in May that killed a senior Islamic State leader.
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Obama commented for the first time on his decision to send a small group of special operations forces to Syria, a move that deepened USA involvement in the conflict there in a way he has previously avoided.
President Obama said Monday that the USA special forces he is sending to fight the Islamic State in Syria won’t be engaged in firefights “on the front lines”.
One of the groups the USA troops will be working with is a Kurdish militia known as the YPG, which could pose a political problem for the United States.
The White House contends Obama isn’t backtracking on his commitment to keep USA troops out of Syria because the new military presence is narrow. But it is in the interest of the White House to appear trying to revive the “Geneva process” and give the eternally optimistic John Kerry another chance to pursue a Chimera in Syria.
The addition of special operations forces, however, marks a shift for Obama who has steadfastly said he would not put US boots on the ground in Syria.
While the U.S. military footprint in the region grows, each step is taken on a small scale so as to reassure the public he is not plunging the country into another large, open-ended conflict.
“I think it’s a combination of the failure of the broader strategy in Iraq over the previous year, the challenges of creating the so-called safe zone in the north of Syria, the refugee crisis, the Russian intervention, and thus, the overall sense that we can’t pretend we’re on a successful or promising track any longer and can’t claim that the war will burn itself out without us”, O’Hanlon said.
In September 2013, he dismayed allies when he abandoned plans to strike Syria after accusing President Bashar al-Assad of violating a U.S. “red line” by using chemical weapons, once it became clear legislators did not support the action.
“What we’re about to accomplish is to turn Syria over to Russian Federation and Iran, and to make sure that we never destroy [Isis] on Obama’s watch, and pass this mess on to the next president”, Graham said on Fox News Sunday, referring to the Islamic State militants.
No military power, not even the United States, can change the course of a civil war in a few distant land by putting 50 pairs of boots on the ground. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordination Committees group said government forces fired more than 11 missiles at a market in the suburb of Douma.
The decision to send USA special forces to Syria will put US forces “in harm’s way”, U.S. Defence Secretary Ash Carter said on Friday, adding he did not rule out the possibility of further special forces deployments to Syria.
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But Joseph Bahout, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for worldwide Peace, denounced what he called Obama’s “strategy of no strategy”, saying the president wanted to ease his conscience and give the illusion he was doing something. “The U.S.is very much involved in war in Syria”. “Will America allow Russian ground forces to go into America without an agreement?” They could also help coordinate air strikes from the ground, the officials said.
