‘First task’ is to aid Iraqi forces in pushing Isis out of Iraq, while battle for Kobani is downplayed as peripheral to regional strategy

The commander of the US war against the Islamic State (Isis) placed the Syria side of his cross-border campaign on the back burner on Friday and could not predict when Iraqi forces will recapture territory from the jihadist army.



“Iraq is our main effort, and it has to be, and the things that we’re doing right now in Syria are being done primarily to shape the conditions in Iraq,” General Lloyd Austin, the commanding officer of US Central Command, told reporters at the Pentagon on Friday.

Even as Austin indicated that coming to Iraq’s aid would retain central importance to the US’s newest Middle Eastern war, US warplanes have launched the conflict’s most intense barrage thus far in support of the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani, where at least 60 air strikes rained down on Isis positions, equipment and fighters over the past 72 hours.

Austin described the battle for Kobani – which US officials have downplayed as peripheral to the anti-Isis strategy – as a target of opportunity, despite contending that Isis seeks to have the US divert its attention to marginal fights.

“I think that I’m able to do what we’re able to do, and manage my resources, so I can take advantage of an opportunity that he has presented me, and he presented that opportunity by continuing to funnel forces into Kobani. Again, the more I attrit him there, the less I’ll have to fight him on some other part of the battlefield,” Austin said.

Yet Austin diminished expectations for capitalising on that opportunity, saying Kobani’s fall to Isis was “highly possible”, despite a week of US bombing.

The battlefield Austin portrayed as critical is within Iraq, where Austin had previously served as the last commander of the second Iraq war, ahead of a 2011 full troop withdrawal that he is said to have opposed.

His “first task”, Austin said in his first press briefing since Barack Obama took the US back to war in Iraq, will be to aid Iraqi forces in restoring security, reconstituting Iraq’s border with Syria and “regenerat[ing] some much-needed combat power”.

That task follows from the June arrival of US military “advisers”, but Austin offered no indication of when it will bear fruit in terms of pushing Isis out of Iraqi territory the jihadists have seized.

“It’s difficult to designate a specific point in time when they’ll be able to do this,” Austin said, offering instead “incremental” evidence of Kurdish success and an Iraqi division’s advance toward Ramadi in support of a division already there. Anbar province, in which Ramadi sits, is “contested”, and Austin mused about the “help of the tribes” there, recalling the 2006-2008 enlistment of Sunni tribesmen and ex-insurgents that retains a central role in the US military’s understanding of why its greatest period of tactical success in Iraq was possible.

But Austin portrayed a battle to recapture Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, as long off, owing to an insufficiently capable Iraqi army.

“It is difficult terrain, and so we want to make sure that when we take that on, that we have the adequate capability, and we’ve set the conditions right to get things done,” Austin said.

During the previous Iraq war, the US spent nearly a decade and hundreds of billions of dollars building, arming and mentoring Iraqi military and police units, only to see them overwhelmed by Isis. Austin offered no indication as to why a far less resourced initiative in 2014 will succeed, attributing its spring collapse in northern Iraq to “poor leadership”, a reference to the deposed Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Nor did Austin offer additional detail about training a Syrian proxy force, a task he said the US can “hopefully” achieve “to help us in Syria, when we get to that piece”.

John Allen, a retired marine general and special diplomatic envoy for the anti-Isis war, suggested on Wednesday that the US would not use the Free Syrian Army as the core of its Syrian proxy. Building that proxy force, which began as a rebel group fighting Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, is in its infancy, and it is estimated the process will last nearly a year before generating its first capable units.

A no-fly zone to protect Syrian rebels from their primary enemy, Assad, has yet to be decided upon, Austin indicated. The outgoing chairman of the Senate armed services committee, Carl Levin, lent his support this week to establishing a no-fly zone, a measure seen by advocates as necessary for convincing Syrians the US will protect them and encouraging them to join the fight against Isis.

“We’re not there at this point,” Austin said.