President Obama said Monday that the deployment of a large ground force to combat the Islamic State (ISIL) would be “a mistake” in response to the group’s wave of shocking terrorist attacks in Paris.
“If you have a handful of people who don’t mind dying, they can kill a lot of people,” he said.
“What happens when there’s a terrorist attack generated from Yemen? Do we then send troops into there? A strategy has to be one that can be sustained,” he added.
The President made the remarks at a previously-planned G-20 summit in Turkey. At the meeting, Obama and other world leaders pledged to step up airstrikes and their support of local ground forces already fighting the self-proclaimed caliphate.
Friday’s attacks in and around the French capital have thus far killed 129 people and wounded 352 others. The seven assailants who committed the terrorist acts both ended and added to their massacres by carrying out suicide bombings. ISIL claimed responsibility for the mass murders.
The government of France responded on Sunday by bombing Raqqa, ISIL’s center of power. French officials claimed that a joint operation with US forces attacked “command, recruitment, munitions and training facilities,” according to Al-Jazeera.
There were doubts, however, about the extent to which this is true. “Writing on Twitter, the anti-ISIL activist group Raqqa is Being Silently Slaughtered said air strikes had also hit a stadium, a museum, clinics, a hospital, a chicken farm and a local governmental building,” Al-Jazeera noted.
The New York Times also reported that American military strategists on Monday started implementing a new tactic against ISIL, but that they had been planning the move before Friday. American forces are now attacking crude oil-smuggling trucks within ISIL-held territory in Syria. The first wave of airstrikes targeting the transports destroyed 116 trucks in eastern Syria, near Deir al-Zour, according to The Times.
Due to concerns about lasting damage–environmental, political, and economic–American policymakers at the start of last year’s counter-ISIL campaign had been concerned about even attacking oil production infrastructure in Syria, but about five months in they claimed to have destroyed 200 oil wells. Baghdad has asked the coalition to refrain from firing on oil production infrastructure in ISIL-held Iraqi territory.
US officials told The Times that American pilots on Monday dropped leaflets warning drivers to abandon their vehicles and that there were no civilian casualties to report in the aftermath of the airstrikes.
The Pentagon’s assessment of its counter-ISIL airstrikes, however, has come into question in recent months. In September, the London-based transparency initiative Airwars.org reported that the Department of Defense looked into dozens of allegations that coalition planes killed civilians in Syria and dismissed 80 percent of them in under 48 hours.
The alleged killings, tied to incidents that occurred between September 2014 and April 2015, were believed to have been largely caused by the Syrian Government, but an investigative journalist leading Airwars.org said “numerous” charges of coalition culpability were dismissed “based on extremely limited information.”
“Few of these events were later re-examined, despite significant evidence of civilian deaths often emerging,” Chris Woods said. The reports referenced by the group allege that the coalition might have killed up to 117 civilians, mostly in Syria.
Also of note, Friday’s attacks in Paris occurred just after the US increased its support of Kurdish and Yazidi fighters in Iraq. After one day of fighting, with the help of American airstrikes, Kurdish and Yazidi forces on Friday drove ISIL from the city of Sinjar.
