Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

U.S. Will Deploy 560 More Troops to Iraq to Help Retake Mosul From ISIS

Video
bars
0:00/1:43
-0:00

transcript

Carter Announces New Troop Deployment

Ashton B. Carter, the American defense secretary, announced on Monday while on a trip to Baghdad that the United States would take new measures to help Iraq retake Mosul from the Islamic State.

Baghdad, Iraq - 11 July, 2016 // POOL - AP CLIENTS ONLY // En Route to Baghdad - 11 July, 2016 // SOUNDBITE (English) Ashton Carter, US Defense Secretary “The envelopment of Mosul occurs in a pincer between a movement from the south from Iraqi security forces and a movement from the north from the Peshmerga forces. Both will be supported by and enabled by U.S. and coalition forces.” // SOUNDBITE (English) Ashton Carter, US Defense Secretary “In connection with my meetings in Iraq, we continue to look for ways to further accelerate, as we have already in many ways, the campaign to deliver ISIL a lasting defeat in Iraq and Syria. We’re looking for opportunities to do more, we’re prepared to do more.” // SOUNDBITE (English) Ashton Carter, US Defense Secretary “They include as you note the ability to accompany down to the battalion level, that is effective, has proven effective, will continue to be effective, as well as air support, equipment, supplies, logistics, a whole host of enablers that are in use there and as I have indicated, and as the President has shown himself consistently willing to do, we will provide more if and when the Iraqi security forces can make good use of them and Prime Minister Abadi requests them.” // SOUNDBITE (English) Ashton Carter, US Defense Secretary “The seizure of the Qayara West airfield, that will be followed, its purpose is to create a logistics up there. There will be U.S. logistics support. That’s one of the purposes for being there, to help consolidate that.”

Video player loading
Ashton B. Carter, the American defense secretary, announced on Monday while on a trip to Baghdad that the United States would take new measures to help Iraq retake Mosul from the Islamic State.CreditCredit...Associated Press

BAGHDAD — President Obama will send 560 more troops to Iraq to help retake Mosul, the largest city still controlled by the Islamic State, a deployment intended to capitalize on recent battlefield gains that also illustrates the obstacles that Mr. Obama has faced in trying to wind down America’s wars.

The additional troops, announced here on Monday by Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter, are the latest escalation of the American military role in Iraq by Mr. Obama, who withdrew the last American soldiers from Iraq at the end of 2011.

He began sending them back three years later after Islamic State fighters swept into the country from Syria.

Many of the newly deployed troops will be based at an airfield 40 miles south of Mosul that was reclaimed by Iraqi soldiers on Saturday. Administration officials said the airfield would be critical to a successful military operation because the United States could use it as a staging area to provide logistical support to Iraqi forces as they try to retake Mosul.

The Iraqis have struggled with the logistics of moving troops and equipment and these tasks will become more difficult as their forces move closer to Mosul, 250 miles from major supply hubs in Baghdad.

The deployment will bring the official number of American service members in Iraq to 4,647. The United States had about 130,000 service members in the country about a decade ago.

“We need to move to this place to be as close to the fighting as we have been,” said Lt. Gen. Sean B. MacFarland, the head of American forces in Iraq, speaking to reporters with Mr. Carter at the Baghdad airport.

For Mr. Obama, sending more troops raises the chances that he could fulfill his hope of handing over a liberated Mosul to his successor. But it also means that he will leave the next president with a significant military presence in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Last week, Mr. Obama announced the United States would keep 8,400 troops in Afghanistan indefinitely.

At a NATO meeting in Poland over the weekend, the president spoke of his frustrations with these long-running military engagements. In Iraq, he noted, American troops vanquished Al Qaeda in Iraq, a Sunni militant group. But the extremists reconstituted themselves in Syria as the Islamic State, before seizing the cities of Falluja and Mosul.

Still, the president said Iraqi forces had made important gains in the last several weeks. Most important, they retook Falluja, a victory that he said, “got a little bit lost in the news, but that’s a big town.”

“They’re now positioning themselves so that they can start going after Mosul,” the president said. The Islamic State fighters, he said, were “on their heels, and we’re going to stay on it.”

White House officials resisted suggestions that more American troops might be needed to uproot the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, from Mosul.

“The president has been very clear about what our mission is and what our mission isn’t,” the press secretary, Josh Earnest, said on Monday. “This is an effort to reinforce our support for Iraqi forces that are enjoying some success in driving ISIL out of strategic, important areas in Iraq, that can put them in a position to succeed on a much bigger goal: driving ISIL out of Iraq’s second largest city.”

Some of the American troops who will be stationed at the airfield, known as Qaiyara Airfield West, specialize in infrastructure projects, like building bridges, which is a technical skill the Iraqis will need for the assault on Mosul because the Islamic State has destroyed many around the city.

The new deployment comes two years after Mr. Obama said that while the United States would help Iraq reclaim territory from the Islamic State, its efforts would “not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” Since then, he has steadily increased the number of troops and given them more authority. Three service members have been killed.

In April, Mr. Carter came to Baghdad to announce that Mr. Obama had given American military advisers the approval to work closer to the front lines of the conflict with smaller units of Iraqi forces. As part of that announcement, Mr. Obama deployed an additional 217 troops.

Mosul is now the only major city in the country that the Iraqis do not control, and the Islamic State has not seized any substantial new territory since May 2015. Still, the Iraqis do not seem to be able to stop the Islamic State from launching devastating suicide attacks in Baghdad, including one this month that killed 300 people.

“As ISIL loses territory and the fraud of the caliphate becomes more obvious, they are going to start resorting to more traditional terrorist tactics,” Mr. Obama said in his news conference. “They can’t govern. They can’t deliver anything meaningful to the people whose territory they can control. The one thing they know how to do is kill.”

To help the Iraqis stop the bombings, Mr. Carter said a three-star general in charge of the American military’s task force on improvised explosive devices would be sent to Baghdad to work with the Iraqis.

The general and his staff would bring “that substantial experience and tradecraft that we learned by hard experience in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Mr. Carter said.

American commanders have begun referring to the Qaiyara Airfield West as “Key West” or “Q West” because its Iraqi name is difficult for them to pronounce. As the Iraqi military closed in on the base last week, Islamic State fighters quickly fled and the Iraqis, who lost control of it in 2014, faced little resistance. Iraqi military officials said in interviews on Monday that there was substantial damage to the air base that would require repairs.

“We were surprised by how destroyed the base was and how they had done it in an organized way,” said Abdul Ghani al-Assadi, the commander of Iraqi counterterrorism forces, who planned the operation.

Mr. Assadi said one of two runways at the airfield had been badly damaged, along with some buildings. A small group of American forces surveyed the airfield shortly after the Iraqis seized it, but American military officials said it was still unclear how much time it would take before cargo planes and other aircraft could begin landing there.

The official estimate of 4,647 troops in Iraq understates the actual number of American military personnel in the country. The Pentagon uses a system for counting troops that excludes commandos and those who are supposed to be stationed in the country for less than four months.

All told, Defense Department officials have said there are probably more than 5,000 Americans in Iraq.

Michael S. Schmidt reported from Baghdad and Mark Landler from Washington. Falih Hassan contributed reporting from Baghdad

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Will Deploy More Troops to Iraq to Help Retake Mosul. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT