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Barack
Obama doubles US troop levels for war against Isis in Iraq
Pledge to avoid ‘boots on the ground’ strained as 1,500
additional US troops ordered to Iraq to bolster Iraqi and Kurdish forces
fighting Islamic State
Barack
Obama has authorized the doubling of US troop levels in Iraq for the war
against Islamic State (Isis) militants, further straining his pledgeagainst “boots on the ground”.
Obama ordered an additional 1,500 troops to
Iraq on Friday to bolster the performance of Iraqi and Kurdish forces fighting
Isis in ground combat. The training, the Pentagon said, is expected to last the
better part of a year, raising questions about when the Iraqis will be able to
wrest territory away from Isis.
The new
troops, the Pentagon emphasized, will not be used in a combat role, similar to
roughly the same number of “advisers” who have been performing a similar role in Iraq since June. Troop levels
in Iraq will soon stand at about 3,000.
Meanwhile, US warplanes will continue their
near-daily bombardment of Isis targets from the air.
To
finance the expanded effort, the White House has asked Congress for an
additional $5.6bn, which will sustain operations like the air strikesand
associated logistics. The money includes $1.6bn as a “train and equip fund” for
Iraqi and Kurdish units to enable them to “go on the offensive”, said budget
director Shaun Donovan.
An additional $3.4bn will be used “to
support ongoing operations” including military advisers, intelligence
collection and ammunition. The rest would go to the State Department to support
diplomacy and to provide aid to neighboring countries including Lebanon and
Jordan.
But the Pentagon said that none of the
additional troops will arrive in Iraq unless and until Congress approves the
funding package, separate from the current spending resolution that expires on
12 December.
The request for new troops is not part of
President Barack Obama’s plan to seek a new authorization for the use of
military force from Congress by the end of the year, officials said.
“This I think we would deal with as a
separate topic from the AUMF itself. This funding is related to ongoing
operations which we have the authorization to carry out. This is a separate
legislative agenda item.”
Officials said the president discussed the
need for a new AUMF in his meeting with congressional leaders Friday, which was
joined by senior defense officials.
The additional troops will expand and deepen
US support for Iraqi forces across the country. Approximately 630 of them will
establish and staff two new operations planning centers where US troops will
advise Iraqi brigades, atop the two already in existence since the summer in
Baghdad and Erbil.
Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said the two
centers would be placed in Baghdad and the western Anbar province. There, they
will help design an offensive that the senior US officer in charge of the
anti-Isis war, General Lloyd Austin of Central Command, has said he does not
expect to get underway for months.
Returning
US troops to Anbar places close to Isis, which seeks to consolidate its hold on
the province. Isis has recently executed hundreds of Albu Nimr tribespeople in Anbar, a blow to US ambitions to
turn the Sunni tribes against Isis in a reprieve of the 2006-2008 Sunni
Awakening.
Less settled are the locations across Iraq
of four or five sites where the other 870 US troops will train nine Iraqi army
brigades and three Kurdish peshmerga brigades. Kirby said the US intended to
train Sunni tribal fighters as well.
Kirby did not know if any of the Iraqi
brigades previously received US mentorship during the 2003-2011 Iraq
occupation, but the US had rebuilt the Iraqi military from scratch, only to see
entire divisions collapse against Isis.
The training the brigades will receive is
reminiscent of the last round of US training: assistance with command and
control; leadership; intelligence; logistics; and even basic maneuvering. Their
US mentors will not accompany them on battlefield missions off base, and Kirby
denied that any will call in airstrikes on behalf of Iraqi units.
Even if Congress rapidly approves the
money, it will take nearly a year for the Iraqis to complete their latest US
training. Picking the training sites will take up to three months, Kirby said,
with the training regimen lasting six to seven months.
Kirby said that Iraqi units will continue
fighting throughout the training. But Austin has characterized retaking major
cities like Mosul from Isis as potentially decisive for the current conflict,
suggesting that the heaviest combat of the newest Iraq war may not come until
well into 2015, once the training is complete.
“We
want to make sure that when we take that on, that we have the adequate
capability and we set the conditions right to -- to get things done,” Austin
said on October 17.
Meanwhile, US cooperation with Sunni tribes
to fight Isis is increasing, the White House said, after the massacre of
hundred of members of the Albu Nimr tribe by Isis fighters late last month.
“We’re in touch with the tribes literally
constantly now,” a senior administration official said.
Yet Kirby stopped short of saying that the
Iraqi prime minister, Haider Abadi, has agreed to permit Sunni tribal fighters
to receive US weapons and mentorship. Last week, General Martin Dempsey, the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advocated arming the tribes, and
suggested it would be a condition of an expanded US training relationship with
the Iraqi military.
US officials rejected the assertion that
the additional troops represented mission creep.
“Even with these additional personnel, the
mission is not changing,” a senior administration official said. “The mission
continues to be one of training, advising and equipping Iraqis, and Iraqis are
the ones who are fighting on the ground, fighting in combat. So we are keeping
the limiting factor on the mission. We are adding personnel to better carry out
the mission and again to support the Iraqis as they move forward with their
campaign plan.”
Kirby
said coalition partners will send “over 700” of their own troops to join the
training and equipping of the Iraqi and Kurdish brigades. Thus far, the US has
only named Denmark as a contributing nation, though earlier this week, the UK
government announced it would also deploy troops to train the Iraqis.
US
military officials
have described their strategy as “Iraq first”, intended to push Isis out of
Iraq, a task they expect to take months, if not years. Their complementary
effort in adjoining Syria to train a proxy ground force, which has not yet
begun, is often described as an adjunct, to prevent Isis from resupplying its
war campaign in Iraq and re-establishing the border that Isis erased.
That
strategy saw setbacks in the past week with the Albu Nimr tribal executions
and deep losses sustained by Syrian rebel groups whom the US sought to
cultivate as partners. Yet the administration and the Pentagon insist that
judging the incipient effort as a failure is premature.
Representative Buck McKeon of California,
the retiring chairman of the House armed services committee, said the new
funding request is “welcome” but added that he remains “concerned that the
president’s strategy to defeat [Isis] is insufficient”. Hagel is scheduled to
testify to McKeon’s committee next week.
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