As Peshmerga commit to ground forces, more pressure on US to deploy troops

NEW YORK - With Islamic State (ISIS) militants proving more resilient to US-led airstrikes than was originally envisaged, US President Barack Obama’s strategy in Iraq and Syria is coming under ever-greater scrutiny.

Over the weekend, Sen. John McCain, a Republican, called for “more boots on the ground”, the further arming of Kurdish Peshmerga forces, creating a no-fly zone and buffer zone in Syria and ratcheting up the number of US-led airstrikes. “Frankly, I know of no military expert who believes we are going to defeat ISIS with this present strategy,” McCain said.

ISIS, a sectarian Sunni Muslim group that is also known as IS and ISIL, has made gains in Iraq’s western province of Anbar and continues to besiege Kobane, a Syrian Kurdish town along Turkey’s border, despite airstrikes by the US and its allies.

Obama says ISIS can be routed with airstrikes and by arming Kurds, Iraqis and moderate Syrian opposition fighters as ground forces. Critics say he over-depends on air power, lacks reliable allies as ground forces and has no solution to Syria’s civil war.

“Key Democrat and Republican hawks are already pressuring Obama to formally introduce combat troops,” Reese Erlich, author of Inside Syria, told Rudaw. “As airstrikes prove incapable of destroying IS, the administration will likely introduce more ground troops, perhaps renaming them 'limited, temporary, counterinsurgency advisers'."

In the Kurdistan Region, the presidential office said Tuesday that Peshmerga forces would be fighting in Kobane with heavy weapons “within days.”

US-led aircraft struck ISIS on Monday and Tuesday as part of operation Inherent Resolve, hitting targets around Kobane, the Bayji oil refinery, Mosul Dam and against an ISIS offensive to the north of Fallujah, the US military said in a statement.

More and more Americans say combat ground troops should be deployed against ISIS. A recent poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal found that 41 per cent of Americans say anti-ISIS efforts should include combat troops, while 35 per cent say they should be limited to airstrikes.

Christopher Harmer, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, said ISIS operates as a “light, dismounted infantry” that conducts targeted assassinations of key leaders to gain control of an area and lacks infrastructure for aircraft to target.

“ISIS has defeated, at the tactical level, the Syrian army, Hezbollah, Jabhat al Nusra, the Peshmerga and the Iraqi army. They are 5-0 against potential enemies in the area,” he told Rudaw. “The idea that we can beat them by dropping bombs is ridiculous. 
“Somebody has to be the boots on the ground fighting these guys.”

Last week, the head of US forces in the Middle East, Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, said that Iraqi troops are slowly recapturing ground from ISIS but warned that winning back the country’s northwest will be a drawn-out process.

“They are doing some things now to incrementally recapture ground that’s been lost,” he said on Friday, citing the recapture by Kurdish forces of Mosul Dam and Rabia border post. Meanwhile, US-led airstrikes are preventing ISIS from travelling around in large convoys, he added.