America to send special troops to counter ISIS in Syria

“Today… we announce the start of the liberation of the southern countryside of Hasaka province”, a spokesman for the Democratic Forces of Syria said in a video statement posted on Youtube and also reported by the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war.

Even as US President Barack Obama sent troops back to Iraq and ordered the military to stay in Afghanistan, he insisted Syria would remain off limits for American ground forces. Now the president has crossed his own red line.

The strategy change also includes positioning more US jets in Turkey to expand American air strikes as Syrian Kurds, Arabs and other opposition fighters prepare to push toward the city of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s defacto capital in Syria.

To destroy the Islamic State group, the president would need a ground combat force large, capable and motivated enough to seize and control significant amounts of territory – and “deploying a handful of special operations forces to Syria can not make a decisive difference”, said Frederic Hof, a former senior adviser on Syria for the Obama administration, now with the Atlantic Council.

The Obama administration’s new strategy may help ease Americans back into the realities of war, but regional experts as well as a few of Obama’s political allies say his slow ramp-up may be insufficient to defeat the fast-moving militants. “It is a Band-Aid of sorts”.

Another US official said that the administration hoped that the military push to defeat Islamic State and the effort to find a diplomatic solution to end Assad’s rule would over time be “mutually reinforcing”. Obama has repeatedly used the costly and unpopular Iraq war in particular as an example of what he’s tried to avoid in the region.

United States warplanes have been bombing purported Daesh positions in Iraq and Syria for over a year now.

The significance of Friday’s announcement was more about the location of the deployment, not the number of troops.

The USA has conducted special operations raids in Syria before and is expected to continue to carry out more unilateral raids.

A man reacts as he mourns the death of his relative after missiles were fired by Syrian government forces on a busy marketplace in the Douma neighborhood of Damascus, Syria, October 30, 2015.

But the crisis has become unavoidable for Obama, particularly since the Islamic State grew out of the chaos and crossed the border into Iraq. What he could once describe as a civil war that needed to be solved by Syrians threatened to upend the whole region.

A U.S.-backed Syrian rebel alliance on Saturday announced a fresh offensive against Islamic State in the northeast province of Hasaka, a day after the United States said it would send special forces to advise insurgents fighting the jihadists.

Obama’s first move was to deploy a few hundred USA troops to Iraq to train and assist local forces in the fight against the Islamic State.

After months of denying that US troops would be in any combat role in Iraq, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter late last week acknowledged that the situation USA soldiers found themselves in during the raid in Hawija was combat. The initial forces to move in are likely to come from within the region, and they may be supplemented later with commandos from outside the area.

Russian Federation has said that President Assad may be ready to deal, and why not?