Defense Secretary Ash Carter told Congress Tuesday that the USA would establish a special operations “targeting force ” in Iraq as part of the intensified military effort to fight ISIS.
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Hof, who is now at the Atlantic Council think-tank, said the us special forces were filling a gap in capable ground forces to fight Islamic State, which won control of Iraq’s Anbar provincial capital of Ramadi in May and also controls the northern of Mosul.
The jihadists captured vast areas of territory and several key cities across Iraq and Syria previous year, and the United States and its allies have been struggling to defeat them ever since.
According to a US official, the new USA step against IS could involve up to a couple hundred troops, including the assault teams, aviation units and other support units.
And it put them in a situation where, yes, they were exchanging fire with the enemy and, tragically, one US military servicemember was killed in that incident.
That pledge, he said, does not appear to apply to USA special operations forces.
Turkey and the Usa hope that by crossing Islamic State from that edge zone it can be deprived by them of a smuggling route which has found its ranks swell with foreign fighters and its coffers boosted by illicit commerce.
Many blame the current chronic instability, cycle of violence, and the emergence of extremist groups such as the IS on the U.S., which invaded Iraq in March 2003 under the pretext of seeking to destroy weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the country. “Tens of thousands of US personnel are operating in the broader Middle East region and more are on the way”.
Speaking to lawmakers in the House Armed Services Committee, the Pentagon chief said he was deploying a “specialised expeditionary targeting force” to Iraq to work alongside local Iraqi and Kurdish peshmerga forces battling the IS group. And for the first time, officials have acknowledged that some of these troops will engage in raids that amount to combat operations.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday that North Atlantic Treaty Organisation members stood ready to step up military efforts against the Islamic State and held out hope of broadening cooperation between the West and Russian Federation to end Syria’s protracted civil war.
“These special operators will over time be able to conduct raids, free hostages, gather intelligence, and capture ISIL leaders”, Carter told the House Armed Services Committee.
The troops who will go on raids will come from the often secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. If more forces are needed, the chairman said he wouldn’t “feel at all inhibited about making recommendations that would cause us to grow greater than 3,500”.
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Carter said their operations in Iraq would create “a virtuous cycle of better intelligence, which generates more targets, more raids, and more momentum”.
