Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, chairman of the House Armed Service Committee, said a more intensive effort against IS in Syria is overdue, but the small deployment might prove to be too little, too late. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that President Obama wanted to provide addition support for Syrian rebels who have been having success already on the battlefield.
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Obama had hoped a ground force trained by Americans elsewhere in the region would have complemented the strikes in Syria.
But the question remains of what the end game for USA strategy looks like – and many believe it can only be answered with a much more forceful debate in the halls of Congress.
The United States said it would deploy fewer than 50 troops to northern Syria beginning in the coming weeks in an open-ended mission.
According to Peter Jennings from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the “small team” was enough to get the US into trouble.
On Saturday, the Democratic Forces of Syria, a coalition of Arab, Christian and Kurdish factions in northern Syria, declared that they have started an operation to “liberate” areas south of the northeastern city of Hassekeh.
The Special Operations troops, even though they will be focused on advising USA allies and not direct combat, still face a real threat.
Those forces were supposed to work with the Iraqi army and local tribal fighters to plan an offensive on Ramadi that has largely stalled.
In Washington, officials said the new US forces will work from headquarters locations and won’t move to the front lines or be used to call in airstrikes. The US has been acting in Syria and Iraq on legal grounds based in the authorization of military force against al Qaeda elements.
More ambitious and costly measures such as no-fly zones or buffer zones that would require tens of thousands of ground troops to effectively protect civilians were rejected. Obama has said he expects the fight against IS in Iraq and Syria to last beyond his presidency.
Earnest drew a contrast between the “large scale, long-term combat operation in Iraq” under former President George W. Bush and the Obama administration’s mission in Syria.
Obama’s first move was to send a few hundred US troops to Iraq to train and assist local forces fighting IS. “Our strategy in Syria hasn’t changed”, said Earnest. “Really, it was an opportunity that fell into our laps”.
“Sen. Sanders expressed concern about the United States being drawn into the quagmire of the Syrian civil war which could lead to perpetual warfare in that region”, spokesman Michael Briggs said in a statement. But Washington has been cautious about publicly committing to help the Syrian Kurds, who are mistrusted by U.S. North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ally Turkey.
The Russian operations have, in particular, sapped momentum from a push by Syrian Arab fighters to drive the from the contested stretch of the border between Syria and Turkey, US officials said.
Top diplomats from 17 countries, as well as the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU), gathered in a conference room of Vienna’s Imperial Hotel for talks bringing together all the main outside players in the four-year-old Syrian crisis for the first time.
The surge in violence came after more than a dozen countries, including the US and Russian Federation, agreed during talks in Vienna on Friday to pursue a new peace effort involving Syria’s government and opposition groups.
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Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, said the administration was essentially prodded into action by two embarrassments: Russia’s advance into the regional power vacuum and scandalous claims US Central Command ginned up positive intelligence reports on its progress against the Islamic State.
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