Barack Obama has authorized the doubling of US troop levels in Iraq for the war against the Islamic State (Isis), further straining his pledge against “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. Those 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 strikes and 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.
The additional troops appear designed to expand and deepen the US ability to support Iraqi forces across the breadth of Iraq. They will establish two new operations planning centers where US troops will advise Iraqi brigades, atop the two already in existence since the summer in Baghdad in Erbil.
There, they will help plan 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.
But “across Iraq”, said Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby, the new complement of forces will establish several training sites to bolster the performance of nine Iraqi army brigades and three Kurdish peshmerga brigades. The cities’ locations have yet to be determined, but Kirby said they will be located in “northern, western and southern Iraq”.
Re-establishing a US presence in western Iraq is significant. Those Sunni areas of Iraq are the heart of territory Isis has wrested from the Iraqis since last December and especially since June, when Mosul in the north-western Ninewa province fell to Isis. Isis has recently executed hundreds of Sunni tribespeople in western Anbar Province, a blow to US ambitions to turn the Sunni tribes against Isis in a reprieve of the 2006-2008 Anbar Awakening.
Kirby said coalition partners will join US forces in training and equipping the Iraqi and Kurdish brigades.
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.
Obama met with Austin, Defense secretary Chuck Hagel, other members of his national security team and the congressional leadership on Friday ahead of the new troop announcement.
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.
