USA sending new special ops force to fight Islamic State

Defense Secretary Ash Carter says the U.S.is expanding the USA special operations force in Iraq to help Iraqi and Kurdish forces fight Islamic State militants.

Abadi was quoted by Reuters as saying: “The Iraqi Government stresses that any military operation or the deployment of any foreign forces, special or not, in any place in Iraq can not happen without its approval and coordination and full respect of Iraqi sovereignty”.

“We do not need foreign ground combat forces on Iraqi land”, Haider al-Abbadi said in a statement on Tuesday.

“This force will also be in a position to conduct unilateral operations into Syria”. In May, a Delta Force raid in Syria killed IS financier Abu Sayyaf, yielded intelligence about the group’s structure and finances, and his wife, held in Iraq, has been cooperating with interrogators.

In Syria, Carter said that U.S-backed local forces are engaging IS fighters in the last remaining pocket of access between Syria and Turkey to the north. The U.S. also is helping a coalition of Syrian Arabs in northeastern Syria, fighting alongside Kurdish forces, that has pushed IS out of the town of al-Hawl and at least 347 square miles of surrounding territory. He said the new force would conduct operations similar to two from earlier this year.

The US has so far gotten away with these escalations by keeping them small, but even this new deployment is coming with officials talking up the idea that this is just the first of many new deployments into the region aimed at combat.

“If all we have is Western aggression, we will never win”, he said.

Carter offered few details on the new group, whose mission promises a more regular operational role for United States special forces than seen since the return of American troops to Iraq previous year.

“[The] pace of air strikes is not constrained by the amount of planes and missiles that we have; the pace has been constrained by how many effective targets we have”, Obama told reporters at the climate change conference in Paris.

One US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the force may number around 200 troops including support personnel, with only several dozen likely to conduct operations.

“In the days ahead, we’ll be aggressive in looking for ways to reinforce success and we’ll seize every opportunity to increase the tempo and effectiveness of our operations”, Dunford said.

“We’re fighting a campaign across Iraq and Syria so we’re going to go where the enemy is, and we’re going to conduct operations where they most effectively degrade the capabilities of the enemy”, Dunford testified.