The Obama administration is dispatching a targeting force of elite U.S. special operations troops into northern Iraq, after top U.S. defense and intelligence officials warned the ISIS network is growing faster than the coalition that’s fighting it, senior U.S. officials tell The Daily Beast.
The new special operations task force, led by the elite Joint Special Operations Command, is aimed at denting the so-called Islamic State group’s popularity by decimating its leadership and gathering the intelligence needed to cut off more of its operations before they can launch.
JSOC will initially lead the targeting effort in Iraq, but the special operations footprint could be expanded to include other special operations forces, a senior military official told The Daily Beast on Tuesday.
“It depends on our success with the initial mission,” which will likely influence how much the Iraqi government will allow, he said.
“We will take every opportunity we can get,” he added.
The task force will be roughly 200 strong, based in northern Iraq, a second senior defense official said.
It’s the sharp end of the spear that will work with roughly 50 special operations advisers who are deploying to northern Syria later this month, to advise local forces how to fight.
“It puts everybody on notice in Syria,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter told Congress on Tuesday. “You don’t know at night who’s going to be coming in the window. And that’s the sensation that we want all of [ISIS’s] leadership and followers to have.”
The war against ISIS began as a mission that President Barack Obama swore would not lead to ground troops. It became an operation in which U.S. officials grudgingly acknowledged forces were not only on the ground but in combat. Tuesday’s announcement suggests that U.S. forces could now be on the front lines.
The announcement of additional troops, made during a House Armed Services Committee on the war effort, surprised many at the Pentagon. Several of those involved in the effort struggled to answer basic questions about the new mission.
One thing that’s clear: The extra forces represent the latest adjustment to a strategy that has been stalled for months, according to Pentagon officials. Indeed, at Tuesday’s testimony, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford admitted that the U.S. had “not contained” ISIS.
Carter and Chairman Dunford told the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that the new “expeditionary” special operations force would carry out raids and hostage rescues in Iraq and Syria.
“The raids in Iraq will be done at the invitation of the Iraqi government and focused on defending its borders and building the Iraqi security force’s own capacity,” Carter said at Tuesday’s hearing.
The move was dismissed by critics of the Obama administration’s ISIS strategy, which relies on 3,500 U.S. troops already in Iraq to train local forces to do the fighting, combined with U.S. and other coalition airpower to hit ISIS targets.
“There is no firm date when we could get ISIS out of Raqqa or even Mosul,” Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain (R-AZ) told MSNBC, referring to ISIS’s Syrian and Iraqi capitals. “And as long as they’re there and they have a base, they’re metastasizing.”
