Speaking from Germany on Monday, President Obama announced plans to send 250 additional special forces to Syria to assist moderate fighters confronting the Islamic State.
The president claimed that the additional troops would build off “momentum” created by the roughly 50 US commandos already operating on the ground in Syria, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“Make no mistake these terrorists will learn the same lesson as others before them have,” Obama said in his remarks, “which is ‘your hatred is no match for our nations united in the defense of our way of life.’”
US officials claimed that the reinforcements will not be leading the fight from the front lines, but will instead play a train and assist role.
“As we have noted in recent days, the President has authorized a series of steps to increase support for our partners in the region, including Iraqi security forces as well as local Syrian forces who are taking the fight to ISIL,” an administration official told CNN.
Last week, in a similar move, the White House announced that 217 troops would be shipping off to Iraq to expand the train and assist mission in the counter-ISIL war.
According to the WSJ, the primary mission of the new contingent of special forces will be to expand Sunni Arab fighting forces in Syria by recruiting new fighters and forging alliances with Kurdish units operating in the North. Administration officials believe that bolstering those forces will be critical to eventually sweeping into ISIL strongholds in and around the city of Raqqa.
In March, the head of the US military’s Special Operations Command, Gen. Joseph Votel told senators that the Pentagon currently doesn’t have a plan to capture the de facto ISIL capital.
This latest military thrust into Syria is likely to cast doubt in prior commitment made by the president about the role of US soldiers in the Islamic State conflict. In 2014, Obama claimed that the his counter-ISIL strategy “won’t involved American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.”
Last December, however, the White House hedged when it was revealed that a small number of US solders are already operating in the Syrian theater. “When I said, ‘No boots on the ground,’ I think the American people understood generally that we’re not going to do an Iraq-style invasion of Iraq or Syria with battalions that are moving across the desert,” the president claimed.
While it’s far short of the peak numbers of soldiers fighting during the Iraq War, US troop numbers are once again on the incline in the region. The latest deployment decision in Syria, will increase the number of American forces to over 300. In Iraq, meanwhile, the number of US boots on the ground is set to increase to over 4,000 for the first time since 2011.
