The increase brings the total United States force authorisation in Iraq to 4,647, and comes just three months after Mr Obama’s last troop addition.
Advertisement
Over 200 US troops, backed by additional American air power and a shipment of heavy weapons, were ordered into Iraq earlier this year to support the Mosul offensive, which administration officials had hoped would be under Iraqi control by the end of the year.
Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, the top US commander in Iraq, said troops already have received warning orders to deploy and will flow in “relatively soon”. Last week, the president announced the US would keep 8,400 troops in Afghanistan indefinitely. “Make no mistake about that”.
MacFarland said USA forces “will not be any closer to the enemy than we’ve been anywhere else”. “As always, when we bring forces to an area, we bring in a security envelope, there’s a security element that goes with it”.
The interior ministry spokesman, Brig Gen Saad Maan, said the troops were “practising for a planned military parade for a specific occasion”. Since then, he has steadily increased the number of troops in Iraq and given them more authority. But the Americans may also accompany Iraqi forces.
“You will now embark on the next major steps of our campaign-to collapse [ISIS] control over Mosul here in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria”, Carter told USA troops during an unannounced visit to Baghdad.
Carter’s daylong visit to Iraq comes on the heels of the two-day North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit where allies agreed to expand their military support for the war.
MacFarland said, “We are starting to put pressure on the enemy’s terror networks, threat networks that are around the capital, and we’ll continue to ramp that up over time”.
The announcement ran into flak in Congress, where Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, complained that the war against Islamic State “cannot be won by inches” and insisted the White House needs to submit a supplemental budget request. Those deployments can only be fully supported through a supplemental budget request.
Iraqi troops, aided by Kurdish fighters from northern Iraq and USA -led airstrikes, have slowly but steadily been tightening a noose around Mosul.
The troops captured the Qayara airfield on Saturday which they intend to use in their final offensive against ISIS in its Mosul stronghold.
The Sunni extremists, who consider Shias to be 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 United States troops left at the end of 2011.
The troops will provide infrastructure and logistical support to the Iraqi forces as they fight for Mosul, he said.
Mr Carter told reporters earlier that USA advisers are prepared to accompany Iraqi battalions if needed, as those units begin the siege of the key northern city.
USA military commanders have begun calling the Qayara Airfield West “Q West”, or “Key West”, because its Iraqi name is hard to pronounce.
A member of the Iraqi security forces stands guard at the site of a auto bomb attack in Rashidiya, a district north of Baghdad, Iraq on July 12, 2016.
The developments came on the heels of two large-scale attacks claimed by the Islamic State group that killed more than 300 people last week.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has pledged to retake Mosul from IS before the end of the year, though it is unclear when a concerted campaign will begin.
Islamic State-held territory in both countries dropped from just over 48,000 square miles down to 42,000 square miles – roughly the size of West Virginia – over the last six months, according to a new report by counterterrorism analysts at IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review.
Advertisement
“Its goal is to create a logistics hub there, so there will be US logistics support”. Nineveh is the province where Mosul is located.
