Pentagon chief in Afghanistan to meet with US commanders

They will assist Iraqi forces planning to encircle and eventually retake the biggest city anywhere that has fallen under IS’ control. The Sunni extremists, who consider Shiites heretics, swept across northern and western Iraq in the summer of 2014, capturing large chunks of territory and plunging the country into its worst crisis since USA troops left at the end of 2011.

U.S. Army Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the top North Atlantic Treaty Organisation commander, told reporters at the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation meeting that the Afghan mission is key to global security.

Carter announced President Barack Obama’s decision as he met about 120 troops in a building at Baghdad’s airport, shielded from scorching desert hovering near 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Last week, the president announced the USA would keep 8,400 troops in Afghanistan indefinitely.

Government forces said on Saturday they had recovered the air base, about 60 km (40 miles) from the northern city, with air support from the USA -led military coalition.

Carter told reporters that USA advisers are prepared to accompany Iraqi battalions in operations, as those units begin the Mosul siege. It’s not clear when exactly that will happen.

Defense Department officials have said there are approximately more than 5,000 Americans in Iraq. But the facilities are damaged by years of fighting, and may require repairs to be operational. Officials weren’t authorized to talk about the airfield publicly and demanded anonymity.

The recapture of Mosul, Islamic State’s de facto Iraqi capital, from which its leader declared a modern-day caliphate in 2014, would be a major boost for the plans by Abadi and the United States to weaken the militant group.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, left, speaks as Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, right, listens during press conference at the Presidential Palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday, July 12, 2016.

Carter called it a strategic victory.

According to Atheel al-Nujaifi, a former Mosul governor and current commander of Iraq’s Hashd al-Watani forces (which will take part in the upcoming campaign), some 4,000 troops have been deployed in the town of Bashiqa northwest of Mosul while some military forces had already been sent – covertly – into Mosul itself.

Iraqi forces were already improving the base’s perimeter in case of a counterattack from the nearby town of Qayara, which Islamic State militants still hold, another USA official in Baghdad said. Marine Staff Sgt. Louis F. Cardin was killed there in March in an IS rocket attack.

The new troops were “ready to come” and it would be a matter of “days and weeks, not months”, he said. “Iraqi security forces, accompanied and advised by us as needed, will complete the southernmost envelopment of Mosul”, he said.

A small contingent of US Special Forces are reported to have landed at the airfield to work with Iraqi troops for the next stages of the operation. In addition to taking part in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation advisory-and-assist mission, the United States has special operations forces in the country that conduct counterterrorism missions. They previously were limited to advising at headquarters and division levels, further away.