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 U.S. defense officials said on Monday that Washington will deploy
about 200 additional troops, mostly as advisers for Iraqi troops as
they advance towards Mosul, the largest Iraqi city still under
Islamic State control.
"As we see the Iraqis willing to fight and gaining ground, let's
make sure that we are providing them more support," U.S. President
Barack Obama said in an interview with CBS News.
"My expectation is that by the end of the year, we will have created
the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall," Obama said.
The United States has also authorized the use of Apache attack
helicopters to help the Iraqis as they can provide quicker air
support and precision fire.
The advisers will accompany Iraqi units of about 2,500 troops moving
closer to the front lines of battle. Until now, the advisers were
limited to larger divisions of about 10,000 troops located further
back from the battlefield.
The change will allow them to offer quicker advice to Iraqi troops
as they try to retake Mosul, likely facing stiff resistance from an
entrenched enemy. But it could also leave the U.S. advisers more
vulnerable to enemy mortars and artillery.
"This will put Americans closer to the action," U.S. Defense
Secretary Ash Carter said. "Their whole purpose is to be able to
help those forces respond in a more agile way."
The decision to enlarge the U.S. military force was made in close
concert with Iraqi authorities, said Carter, who met U.S. commanders
and Iraqi officials including Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi on a
visit to Baghdad.
Iraq is engulfed in a political crisis over anti-corruption reforms
that is crippling state institutions and threatening to slow the
campaign against the militants.
The increase raises the authorized troop level in Iraq to 4,087, not
including special operations personnel, some logistics workers and
troops on temporary rotations.
The Pentagon will also provide up to $415 million to Kurdish
peshmerga military units, who have played an important role in
pushing back Islamic State in northern Iraq. Part of that funding
will likely be spent on basics like food, said Lieutenant General
Sean MacFarland, head of the U.S.-led coalition battling Islamic
State.
"Right now the peshmerga are not getting enough calories to keep
them in the field," MacFarland said.
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The increase is the latest move by the United States, which invaded
Iraq in 2003 to overthrow Saddam Hussein, to step up its campaign
against the hardline Sunni jihadists.
Since December, Iraqi forces trained by the U.S. military and backed
by coalition air strikes have taken back territory from Islamic
State, which seized swathes of Iraq and Syria in 2014.
ESCALATING SUPPORT
Some U.S. troops already in Iraq will be shifted to establishing
logistics for Iraqi forces as they move towards Mosul, Carter said.
These include supply lines, particularly important as Mosul is 400
km (250 miles) north of Baghdad.
Most of the new U.S. advisers, who will make up the bulk of the new
troops, will be Army Special Forces, as are the about 100 advisers
now in Iraq. The rest of the troops announced on Monday include
support crew for the Apaches and security forces to protect the
advisers.
The United States will also deploy an additional long-range rocket
artillery unit to support Iraqi ground forces in the battle for
Mosul, Carter said. Two such batteries are already in place in Iraq.
The officials did not rule out the possibility that lasting success
might require further U.S. commitments.
"If it doesn't take us all the way, we'll come back and have another
discussion and ask for more if we need to," McFarland said.
(Additional reporting by Maher Chmaytelli and Stephen Kalin and Eric
Beech in Washington; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Jonathan Oatis)
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