Pledge to avoid ‘boots on the ground’ strained as 1,500 additional US troops ordered to Iraq to bolster Iraqi and Kurdish forces fighting Islamic State

Barack Obama has authorized the doubling of US troop levels in Iraq for the war against Islamic State (Isis) militants, further straining his pledge against “boots on the ground”.

Obama ordered an additional 1,500 troops to Iraq on Friday to bolster the performance of Iraqi and Kurdish forces fighting Isis in ground combat. The training, the Pentagon said, is expected to last the better part of a year, raising questions about when the Iraqis will be able to wrest territory away from Isis.

The new troops, the Pentagon emphasized, will not be used in a combat role, similar to roughly the same number of “advisers” who have been performing a similar role in Iraq since June. Troop levels in Iraq will soon stand at about 3,000.

Meanwhile, US warplanes will continue their near-daily bombardment of Isis targets from the air.

To finance the expanded effort, the White House has asked Congress for an additional $5.6bn, which will sustain operations like the air strikes and associated logistics. The money includes $1.6bn as a “train and equip fund” for Iraqi and Kurdish units to enable them to “go on the offensive”, said budget director Shaun Donovan.

An additional $3.4bn will be used “to support ongoing operations” including military advisers, intelligence collection and ammunition. The rest would go to the State Department to support diplomacy and to provide aid to neighboring countries including Lebanon and Jordan.

But the Pentagon said that none of the additional troops will arrive in Iraq unless and until Congress approves the funding package, separate from the current spending resolution that expires on 12 December.

The request for new troops is not part of President Barack Obama’s plan to seek a new authorization for the use of military force from Congress by the end of the year, officials said.

“This I think we would deal with as a separate topic from the AUMF itself. This funding is related to ongoing operations which we have the authorization to carry out. This is a separate legislative agenda item.”

Officials said the president discussed the need for a new AUMF in his meeting with congressional leaders Friday, which was joined by senior defense officials.

The additional troops will expand and deepen US support for Iraqi forces across the country. Approximately 630 of them will establish and staff two new operations planning centers where US troops will advise Iraqi brigades, atop the two already in existence since the summer in Baghdad and Erbil.

Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said the two centers would be placed in Baghdad and the western Anbar province. There, they will help design an offensive that the senior US officer in charge of the anti-Isis war, General Lloyd Austin of Central Command, has said he does not expect to get underway for months.

Returning US troops to Anbar places close to Isis, which seeks to consolidate its hold on the province. Isis has recently executed hundreds of Albu Nimr tribespeople in Anbar, a blow to US ambitions to turn the Sunni tribes against Isis in a reprieve of the 2006-2008 Sunni Awakening.

Less settled are the locations across Iraq of four or five sites where the other 870 US troops will train nine Iraqi army brigades and three Kurdish peshmerga brigades. Kirby said the US intended to train Sunni tribal fighters as well.

Kirby did not know if any of the Iraqi brigades previously received US mentorship during the 2003-2011 Iraq occupation, but the US had rebuilt the Iraqi military from scratch, only to see entire divisions collapse against Isis.

The training the brigades will receive is reminiscent of the last round of US training: assistance with command and control; leadership; intelligence; logistics; and even basic maneuvering. Their US mentors will not accompany them on battlefield missions off base, and Kirby denied that any will call in airstrikes on behalf of Iraqi units.

Even if Congress rapidly approves the money, it will take nearly a year for the Iraqis to complete their latest US training. Picking the training sites will take up to three months, Kirby said, with the training regimen lasting six to seven months.

Kirby said that Iraqi units will continue fighting throughout the training. But Austin has characterized retaking major cities like Mosul from Isis as potentially decisive for the current conflict, suggesting that the heaviest combat of the newest Iraq war may not come until well into 2015, once the training is complete.

“We want to make sure that when we take that on, that we have the adequate capability and we set the conditions right to -- to get things done,” Austin said on October 17.

Meanwhile, US cooperation with Sunni tribes to fight Isis is increasing, the White House said, after the massacre of hundred of members of the Albu Nimr tribe by Isis fighters late last month.

“We’re in touch with the tribes literally constantly now,” a senior administration official said.

Yet Kirby stopped short of saying that the Iraqi prime minister, Haider Abadi, has agreed to permit Sunni tribal fighters to receive US weapons and mentorship. Last week, General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advocated arming the tribes, and suggested it would be a condition of an expanded US training relationship with the Iraqi military.

US officials rejected the assertion that the additional troops represented mission creep.

“Even with these additional personnel, the mission is not changing,” a senior administration official said. “The mission continues to be one of training, advising and equipping Iraqis, and Iraqis are the ones who are fighting on the ground, fighting in combat. So we are keeping the limiting factor on the mission. We are adding personnel to better carry out the mission and again to support the Iraqis as they move forward with their campaign plan.”

Kirby said coalition partners will send “over 700” of their own troops to join the training and equipping of the Iraqi and Kurdish brigades. Thus far, the US has only named Denmark as a contributing nation, though earlier this week, the UK government announced it would also deploy troops to train the Iraqis.

US military officials have described their strategy as “Iraq first”, intended to push Isis out of Iraq, a task they expect to take months, if not years. Their complementary effort in adjoining Syria to train a proxy ground force, which has not yet begun, is often described as an adjunct, to prevent Isis from resupplying its war campaign in Iraq and re-establishing the border that Isis erased.

That strategy saw setbacks in the past week with the Albu Nimr tribal executions and deep losses sustained by Syrian rebel groups whom the US sought to cultivate as partners. Yet the administration and the Pentagon insist that judging the incipient effort as a failure is premature.

Representative Buck McKeon of California, the retiring chairman of the House armed services committee, said the new funding request is “welcome” but added that he remains “concerned that the president’s strategy to defeat [Isis] is insufficient”. Hagel is scheduled to testify to McKeon’s committee next week.











