A top official leading the US war against the Islamic State (ISIL) said efforts to seize the fundamentalist group’s de facto capital is gaining momentum.
Brett McGurk, the special US envoy to the counter-ISIL coalition, claimed on Tuesday that the ongoing assault on Manbij, in Northeastern Syria, bodes well for the campaign.
McGurk said the US-backed forces will orient themselves afterward toward Raqqa, ISIL’s main stronghold, if successful. He also noted that the forces are primarily composed of Syrian Arabs, with only a minority of the units made up of Kurds.
“The force that has to move on Raqqa has to be a predominately Arab force,” McGurk said. “That’s why we have increased our special forces inside of Syria, to train and equip that force.”
In March, the head of Special Operations Command said US-backed Syrian forces were “about 80 percent Kurdish.” Lt. Gen. Joseph Votel also said that the forces were “capable” of taking back Raqqa, a predominately Sunni-Arab city, but he admitted that he wasn’t sure.
Last week, US-backed forces entered Manbij for the first time.
When pressed if Raqqa would be seized in 14 months—President Obama said the ISIL war would take three years when launching it, in 2014—McGurk said: “I want to go faster than that.”
“We won’t put a timeline on the Mosul campaign,” he also noted, referring to the largest Iraqi city held by ISIL, “but we’d like to do it as soon as possible.”
The Wall Street Journal noted last week that Syrian government forces, backed by Russian air support, have also attempted to reclaim territory near Raqqa. Syrian and Russian forces are also currently engaged in an effort to seize the city of Aleppo from a coalition of rebel forces.
A ceasefire had briefly stopped much of the fighting throughout Syria for two months, but collapsed in April, as negotiations to bring the war to an end fell apart.
Steffan de Mistura, the United Nations’ Syria special envoy, said last week that he hoped a path forward would be more clear on Wednesday, after a UN Security Council meeting.
De Mistura also said he was hoping to reach a deal by August, “but first he wanted the United States and Russia to make a ‘critical mass,’ of progress on a deal for political transition in Syria,” according to Reuters. US officials want Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down as part of a peace plan, while Russian officials do not want to see Assad leave immediately.
