Turkey-backed rebels and regime forces clash in northern Syria

US -backed Syrian Kurdish forces say they have enough fighters to take the Islamic State group’s de facto capital of Raqqa in northern Syria.

Syria has blasted Turkey over its intervention in the country and backing opposition forces trying to remove President Bashar Assad from power, calling on the U.N. Security Council to press Ankara to withdraw its troops.

The U.S. military has mapped out a series of options for the Syria fight, including increased artillery support, more Apache helicopters and a more robust training campaign.

“For many months the Coalition has been working to enable simultaneous, or overlapping operations”, U.S. Air Force Colonel John Dorrian, the spokesman for the U.S. -led coalition, told Reuters.

Military commanders frustrated by what they considered micromanagement under the previous administration have argued for greater freedom to make daily decisions on how best to fight the enemy In separate comments, Votel also reaffirmed that more American forces are needed in Afghanistan, a point the top USA commander in that country made to Congress several weeks ago.

Cihan Sheikh Ehmed, an SDF spokeswoman, said the coalition has between 50,000 and 54,000 fighters, and more than half of them are Arabs.

In that case, a force from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, established a fire base south of the city in support of Iraqi and Kurdish troops who were then carrying out operations to isolate Mosul from Islamic State-held territory around it.

In recent weeks, government forces have wrested back several villages in Aleppo from Islamic State as part of a Russia-backed onslaught. Those claims are already on life support, so to speak, after ISIS lost Dabiq, a town that has a specific prophecy in regard to Islamist domination.

That sounds like it might be more of a feature than a bug in the Raqqa battle plan. A “caliph” that gets kicked out of his capital – or runs away from it altogether – isn’t much of a caliph at all.

Votel – speaking to a small group of reporters accompanying him on a trip to the Middle East on February 22 – stressed that the Pentagon was not considering sending American combat troops to take over the fighting in Syria and that the strategy developed during the Obama administration of keeping local forces in the lead would not change.

Deeply anxious by the YPG’s influence, Ankara is pressing Washington to take part in the final assault on Raqqa.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, comprising Kurdish and Arab Syrian fighting groups, has been making steady progress toward Raqqa, cutting off a key escape route out of the city just days ago.

Asked on Thursday whether the soldiers soon bound for Kuwait have prepared to operate in such a challenging environment, a military official said they are trained to address “any contingency” in either theater. “Anything could happen at any moment”. Though sidelined by US forces of late, the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army hovers nearby in its fight against the terror group in the north of the country.

The Marines “are ready to conduct their mission” to support the offensive on Raqa, the official told AFP, confirming a report in the Washington Post.