Government forces said on Saturday they had recovered the air base, about 60 km (40 miles) from the northern city, with air support from the USA -led military coalition.
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“The additional troops will provide a range of support for Iraqi security forces, including infrastructure and logistical capabilities at the airfield near Qayyarah”, the Pentagon said in a statement.
The Sunni extremists, who consider Shiites heretics, swept across northern and western Iraq in the summer of 2014, capturing large chunks of territory and plunging the country into its worst crisis since US troops left at the end of 2011.
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has pledged to retake the city, the largest still held by IS, by year-end, but there is still debate in Washington about the timing of any move.
However, there is still debate in Washington about the timing of an offensive on Mosul.
The United States will send an additional 560 troops to help the Iraqi forces retake the city of Mosul from Daesh, Defence Secretary Ash Carter said on Monday.
The additional troops are the latest escalation of the American military’s role in Iraq by President Barack Obama, who withdrew the last of the American soldiers from Iraq at the end of 2011.
Last week, IS killed more than 300 people in two attacks.
“Let me begin… by expressing the condolences of myself and the United States for the terrorist attacks against the people of Iraq in recent weeks”, Carter told Abadi on his fourth visit to the country since becoming defence secretary in 2015.
Al-Asadi said one of two runways at the airfield had been badly damaged, along with some buildings.
The 560 newly deployed US troops will join the more than 4,000 already in Iraq.
Iraqi forces were already improving the base’s perimeter in case of a counterattack from the nearby town of Qayara, which Islamic State militants still hold, another USA official in Baghdad said.
Iraq’s second city Mosul has been under Islamic State group control since June 2014, when the jihadists overran large parts of Iraq, carrying out atrocities including summary execution-style killings, mass kidnappings and rape.
Still, retaking Mosul without a plan to restore security, basic services and governance and the money and personnel to implement it immediately would repeat the mistake the Bush administration made in 2003, by ousting Saddam Hussein with no plan for installing a new government, said three officials from the US and Britain.
The recent uptick in IS attacks beyond the front lines demonstrated the IS group’s ability to launch lethal attacks despite recent territorial losses in both Iraq and Syria, where it has established a self-proclaimed caliphate.
Suicide bombings like the one in Baghdad on July 3 that killed almost 300 people, one of the largest attacks since the US -led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein 13 years ago, suggest the group could remain a long-term threat.
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Earlier plans to consolidate forces in Kabul and Bagram were scrapped amid resurgent Taliban fighting and the growing presence of Islamic State militant, including many that simply switched allegiance from one insurgent group to another. “The threat is not going away”.
