Rubio: Obama’s Syria strategy weak

President Obama was compelled to order this limited deployment because of the changing military balance following Russia’s direct involvement in the war on the side of the Assad regime, and the failure of the global air campaign that the US has been leading for more than a year to seriously degrade or roll back the tactical gains of the Islamic State ISIS in both Iraq and Syria.

Sending special forces into Syria comes roughly a week after another noncombat mission in which US troops rescued hostages scheduled for execution in northern Iraq.

Darwish said the fresh operation would receive air support from a US-led coalition striking IS in Syria since September 2014.

“This is a very complex battle space, and we’re not directly involved in the way we’ve been in the past”, said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

“I am sure that neither the U.S. nor Russian Federation want (the conflict) to become a so-called proxy war”, Mr Lavrov told reporters after the multilateral talks. The goal, for now, is simply to incrementally reinforce those areas that are working and abandon initiatives that are not.

Barack Obama, elected on promises to end USA wars in the Middle East, is presiding over an unprecedented eruption of American militarism that threatens to drag the entire region and potentially the whole world into a military conflagration. “Moreover, they’ll be the kind of force that is more likely to be accepted by the population of Raqqa, and that’s important”. “This announcement is a new and frightening escalation of US military intervention”. “And you defeat them by denying them operating territory”. The troops will not fighting the ISIS on ground, according to media reports.

“Sending 50 American special forces into Syria in the eyes of ISIL shows that Obama is not ‘all in, ‘ it is a sign of weakness to ISIL”, Graham added.

Those forces were supposed to work with the Iraqi army and local tribal fighters to plan an offensive on Ramadi that has largely stalled.

“Such grudging incrementalism is woefully inadequate to the scale of the challenge we face”, McCain said in a statement Friday.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, a member of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, said that as the war escalates beyond 3,500 deployed service members, and airstrikes in Iraq and Syria have cost billions of taxpayer dollars, the administration must propose “a unified strategy that addresses the intertwined challenges posed” by the Islamic State group and Assad.

But experts say the troops could well be more than a token deployment.

The United States on Saturday announced it is providing almost $100 million more in aid to the Syrian opposition for tasks like supporting local councils and civil society activists.

“Deploying a handful of USA special operations forces to Syria will not change this situation significantly”, said Frederic C Hof, former special adviser for the transition in Syria at the U.S. state department.

It was the first declared operation by the Democratic Forces of Syria, which joins together a U.S.-backed Kurdish militia and several Syrian Arab rebel groups, since it announced its formation earlier this month.