US Sends Green Berets to Northern Iraq | Military.com - 0 views
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Special Forces advisors have set up an operations center in northern Iraq as part of the expanding U.S. political and military effort to keep Iraq from splintering against attacks by Islamic extremists, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Thursday. In recent days, a small team of advisors opened up a Joint Operations Center (JOC) in Irbil, capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdish Regional Government, Hagel said at a Pentagon briefing with Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Irbil mission will complement the JOC already in operation in Baghdad in assessing the capability and will of the Iraqi national security forces to combat militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant who have swept across large swaths of western and northern Iraq against little opposition. President Obama has authorized 300 troops for the advisory mission and about 200 are now on the ground, Hagel said. "None will perform combat missions," he said.
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About 550 additional troops have the separate mission of protecting the U.S. Embassy and U.S. facilities at the Baghdad airport with the goal of "providing our diplomats time and space" to press for the formation of a unity government in Iraq, Hagel said. The troops at the airport arrived earlier this week with Apache attack helicopters and small surveillance drones to protect U.S. facilities at the airport should an evacuation be ordered.
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The U.S. has moved the aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush into the Persian Gulf, and has numerous other air assets in the region, but Dempsey stressed that there had been no decisions as yet on the feasibility of airstrikes against ISIL. "We may get to that point," Dempsey said of airstrikes. "I'm suggesting to you that we're not there yet." If airstrikes were ordered, "that's going to be a tough challenge" because of the intermingling of ISIL fighters with Sunni tribes that have supported them, Dempsey said. U.S. pilots probably would attempt not to hit the tribal fighters to send the message that a unified Iraq was in their best interests, Dempsey said. "It matters for the future of Iraq," he said.