The White House announced, on Friday, a new military strategy to put an end to the problem with the Islamic State in Syria, by deploying Special Forces to work alongside with rebel local groups. The strategy is aimed to assure the nation and to avoid being drawn into a new conflict like Iraq or Afghanistan’s wars.
The strategy was not created to combat ISIS directly, instead it was planned to help the rebel groups that operate in Northern Syria, the Kurdish-controlled territory. According to the White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, the number of troops will be remarkable lower with less than 50 Special Operations forces.
According to the White House explanation, this represents an important change in how The United States normally intervenes in the Middle East crisis. It is known that intervention by the U.S. with airstrikes was not functional and it brought negative consequences to solve this situation. However, now this new plan is more strategic and also has important risks, because it is local and has a whole new logistic and a whole new coordination military plan.
“There’s no denying the serious risk they will be facing, but they are not in a combat mission […] I think if we were envisioning a combat operation, we probably would be contemplating more than 50 troops on the ground,” said Josh Earnest in a statement.
Strategic details
The strategy includes important military equipment like A-10 and F- 15 jets, aimed to help local forces to empower their resistance and their fighting capacity on the combat field. These jets will be deployed to Incirlik, an Airbase in Turkey. Furthermore, Obama declared that the strategy will also help to train task forces and groups composed by Syrian Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen established in places such as Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon to create strategic military opportunities to counter the jihadist group.
United States airstrikes
The Iraq war in 2003 showed how the U.S intervention was negative to solve the situation and the Afghanistan war brought as a consequence the expansion and empowerment of terrorist groups. Since 2013, Obama’s policy has been clear about no military intervention to avoid incidents and deaths.
“I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria, I will not pursue an open-ended action like Iraq or Afghanistan,” Obama said in 2013.
However, in 2014, Obama used a new strategy to stop the expansion of ISIS and decided to start using airstrikes as a strategic solution. Nonetheless, the consequences of airstrikes made in 2014 were dozens of deaths of people who lived in Syria and were part of the problem. The strategy that Obama has been using was severely criticized by important countries and international organisms as the United Nations.
A new horizon, ¿Enemies working together?
This plan marks a shift in policy by President Barack Obama, it represents a remarkable change in how the United States may help without causing negative consequences. For the first time, the world might be the witness of how Russia and U.S may agree, despite their differences, and help avoid deaths to eradicate a chaotic international crisis that is affecting millions of people worldwide.
The United States and Russia declared that “substantial differences remain” though they agreed it was “imperative to accelerate all diplomatic efforts to end the war”. Moreover the ministers will reconvene within two weeks.
Source: Washington Post