Obama faces options in Iraq and Syria

Associated Press

Washington

At the heart of President Barack Obama’s quandary over the Islamic State militants is their haven in Syria.

The president may continue helping Iraqi forces try to reverse the group’s land grabs in northern Iraq by providing more arms and American military advisers and by using U.S. warplanes to support Iraqi ground operations. On Friday, the Pentagon announced that U.S. warplanes made three more airstrikes against Islamic State targets near the Mosul Dam, including a machine-gun position that was firing on Iraqi forces.

But what if the militants pull back, even partially, into Syria and regroup, as Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Thursday predicted they would, followed by a renewed offensive?

“In a sense, you’re just sort of back to where you were” before they swept into Iraq, said Robert Ford, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria who quit in February in disillusionment over Obama’s unwillingness to arm moderate Syrian rebels.

“I don’t see how you can contain the Islamic State over the medium term if you don’t address their base of operations in Syria,” he said in an interview before an intensified round of U.S. airstrikes this week helped Kurdish and Iraqi forces recapture a Tigris River dam near Mosul that had fallen under control of Islamic State militants.

On the other hand, Obama has been leery of getting drawn into the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday that the Islamic State militants can be contained only so long, and that at some point their Syrian sanctuary will have to be dealt with.

“Can they be defeated without addressing that part of their organization which resides in Syria? The answer is no,” he told a Pentagon press conference where Hagel called the group a dire threat that requires an international, not just an American, response.

“That [sanctuary] will have to be addressed on both sides of what is essentially at this point a nonexistent border,” Dempsey added, referring to the militants’ dismantlement of any semblance of control of the border with Iraq.

More immediately, perhaps, Obama faces choices in Iraq, whose sectarian divisions and political dysfunction created the opening that allowed Islamic State fighters to sweep across northern Iraq in June almost unopposed. They captured U.S.-supplied weapons that Iraqi forces left behind when they fled without a fight.

Among his options:

Sending more troops to Baghdad to strengthen security for the U.S. Embassy, as requested by the State Department. Officials said the number under consideration is fewer than 300.

Speeding up the arming of Iraqi and Kurdish forces. The administration has been supplying Iraqi government forces with Hellfire missiles, small arms and ammunition, but critics say the pace has been too slow.

Increasing the number and expanding the role of the dozens of U.S. military advisers who are in Baghdad and the Kurdish capital of Irbil to coordinate with Iraqi forces.

Committing U.S. ground troops in Iraq. Obama has said repeatedly he would not do this.

Extending the Iraq air campaign to Islamic State targets in Syria. Stretches of eastern Syria are a sanctuary for the group, also known by the acronyms ISIL or ISIS. The U.S. has warplanes available in the Middle East and Europe that could vastly increase the number and intensity of strikes in eastern Syria if Obama chose.