The article below originally appeared in the Washington Post on October 30th, 2015.
President Obama is sending a small number of Special Operations troops to the Kurdish-majority region of Syria, marking the first full-time deployment of U.S. forces to the chaotic country.
Working with Kurdish Forces
The troops are expected to begin arriving over the next month in Syria, where their main focus will be advising Kurdish and Syrian Arab forces who have fought to within 30 miles of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital, said a senior defense official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.
The U.S. troops are expected to remain largely at the “headquarters level,” where they will assess the local forces and help plan military operations to put continued pressure on Raqqa and a 60-mile-long stretch of the Syria-Turkey border.
Obama Policy Shift
The mission marks a major shift for Obama, whose determination to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has been balanced by an abiding concern that U.S. troops not be pulled too deeply into the intractable Syrian conflict.
The latest deployment will involve fewer than 50 Special Operations advisers who will work with resistance forces battling the Islamic State in northern Syria but will not engage in direct combat, Obama administration officials said.
“This is an intensification of a strategy that the president announced more than a year ago,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said.
The move, which the president’s national security team recommended late last week, reflects Obama’s growing dissatisfaction with the halting progress in Iraq and Syria and his commanders’ sense that the Islamic State has significant vulnerabilities that can be exploited.
Increasing Airstrikes
The deployment of Special Operations forces, along with new U.S. warplanes headed to Turkey, suggests that the airstrikes will soon intensify.
The White House plans to send A-10 ground attack planes and F-15 fighter jets to Incirlik air base in Turkey, where they will be able to support ground operations against the Islamic State. The heavily armored A-10s, which fly low and slow over the battlefield, are built to back ground troops engaged in combat.
The planes will also focus on attacking the Islamic State’s supply lines that connect its base in Syria to its fighters in Iraq. Russia was not made aware of the deployment of U.S. troops into the country, the senior defense official said.
Plans for Iraq & Syria
Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said the administration’s new plan for Iraq and Syria would focus on aiding the slow-moving Iraqi army assault on Ramadi, the military operations around Raqqa and more raids on Islamic State leaders in both countries.
Obama also spoke Friday with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to outline U.S. plans to intensify support for the Ramadi operation and an increase in raids aimed at the Islamic State leadership in the country.
Administration officials said that the U.S. and Iraqi governments are working on plans to establish a joint Special Operations task force to target Islamic State leaders and their network. The raids would be conducted with the support of U.S. Special Operations forces backed with U.S.-supplied intelligence.
Senior defense officials said Obama remained open to deploying Apache attack helicopters and forward air controllers, who are trained to move with Iraqi forces and call in airstrikes, if needed for future operations.
Costly No-Fly Zone
More costly and ambitious measures in Syria, such as no-fly zones or buffer zones that would require tens of thousands of ground troops, did not receive the backing of Obama’s top policy advisers and weren’t among the options forwarded to the president. Many Republicans and Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton have said they favor a no-fly zone in Syria.
Even as the White House announced the measures in Iraq and Syria, senior administration officials played down hopes that the additional forces would fundamentally change the circumstances in either country.
“The president has been quite clear that there is no military solution to the problems that are plaguing Iraq and Syria,” Earnest said. “There is a diplomatic one.”
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