U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced on Monday in Baghdad that his country will soon send 560 additional troops to Iraq to help Iraqi forces in the recapture of Mosul, the stronghold of Islamic State in the Arab country.
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“These additional USA forces will bring unique capabilities to the campaign and provide critical enabler support to Iraqi forces at a key moment in the fight”, Carter said on an unannounced visit to the country.
A small group of U.S. forces surveyed the airfield shortly after it was seized by the Iraqis, but United States military officials said it was unclear how much time it would take before cargo planes and other aircraft could land there. But it could be in the coming weeks and months.
The US troop deployment figure understates the actual number of service members in the country. Originally, the US military expressed hope that it could train sufficient Iraqi troops for an offensive to retake Mosul by spring of 2015. “That’s its strategic role, and that’s its strategic importance”.
USA commanders plan to use the base called Qayara Airfield West as a staging area to provide logistical support to Iraqi forces as they try to retake Mosul. One US Marine, Staff Sergeant Louis Cardin, was killed at that outpost in March, as a result of an IS rocket attack.
“The point of seizing [the Qayyarah] airfield is to be able to establish a logistics and air hub in the immediate vicinity of Mosul”, reported Carter. “So, there will be US logistics support”.
Iraqi forces, backed by United States of America -led airstrikes, retook the air base near Mosul from ISIS, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said Saturday. If Mosul is retaken by Iraqi forces, that would be a huge blow on ISIS and would deprive them of their largest city in either Iraq or Syria.
The ultimate goal was “the recapture of all of Iraqi territory by the Iraqi security forces, but of course Mosul is the biggest part of that”, Carter said earlier.
The officials were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, so spoke on condition of anonymity.
The move comes despite President Obama’s repeated promise that he will send no more us ground troops to fight in Iraq. They previously were limited to advising at headquarters and division levels, further away.
During a meeting later at the Prime Minister’s office, Carter expressed condolences to the Iraqi people on behalf of the US for the recent terror attacks in Iraq and said they strengthened his determination to fight ISIS.
“What I’ll be discussing with Prime Minister Abadi and our commanders there are the next plays in the campaign, which involve the collapse and control over Mosul”, he said.
Mosul is considered crucial.
Speaking to reporters in Baghdad, the defense secretary said, “It’s necessary but not sufficient to destroy ISIL in Iraq and Syria because this is where it began and is what I have called the parent tumor of the cancer … but, like cancer, ISIL has spread to … other places and it also threatens our homelands”.
This is Carter’s fourth trip to Iraq as Pentagon chief, and his second in three months, to assess the campaign to oust Islamic State militants from the country.
Qayara is the latest in a string of successful operations by Iraqi forces, backed by coalition airstrikes. Iraqi forces recently retook both cities.
Islamic State militants, however, still control large swaths of the country and continue to launch deadly attacks, including the massive suicide bombing July 3 at Baghdad’s bustling commercial area of Karada. As many as 186 were killed. As the Iraqi military closed in on the airfield last week, Islamic State fighters quickly fled and the Iraqis, who lost control of the base in 2014, faced little resistance as they reclaimed it.
Moreover, Baghdad and Arbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region, do not appear to have agreed on a plan for Mosul, and any significant participation by Kurdish or Shi’ite forces in a Mosul campaign, one US official said, “would create a whole new set of problems that the Abadi government is incapable of managing, or even mitigating.”Separately, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee said on Monday that President Barack Obama must ask Congress for additional funds to pay for the deployment of more troops to Iraq, as Congress and the White House debate defense spending amid mandatory budget cuts”. North Atlantic Treaty Organisation will use surveillance aircraft to collect intelligence, and will begin training Iraqi forces inside the country.
Iraqi and Kurdish forces have been training and preparing for the final battle.
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President Barack Obama made ending the US’s almost nine-year war in Iraq a centrepiece of his presidency, but Washington has been drawn deeper back into the country by the war against ISIL.
