NOVANEWS
Top US military commander General Martin Dempsey says the Pentagon is considering the deployment of combat troops to Iraq in the fight against the ISIL terrorist group.
Dempsey, chairman of the US military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House of Representatives’ Armed Services Committee on Thursday that the Pentagon is considering recommending that US troops fight alongside Iraqi forces to capture Mosul or border areas with Syria from ISIL terrorists.
“I’m not predicting at this point that I would recommend that those forces in Mosul and along the border would need to be accompanied by US forces, but we’re certainly considering it,” Dempsey said.
He claimed that the US has a modest force in Iraq and “any expansion of that, I think, would be equally modest. I just don’t foresee a circumstance when it would be in our interest to take this fight on ourselves with a large military contingent.”
The top US commander’s comments are contradictory to repeated pledges made by President Barack Obama that US combat troops will not return to Iraq.
On Friday, Obama authorized the deployment of up to 1,500 troops to Iraq, approximately doubling the force the Pentagon has built up in the country since June.
According to reports, the troops are drawn from US Special Operations Forces (SOF), but US officials are calling them military advisers.
The ISIL terrorists, who were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, now control large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria.
US warplanes have been conducting airstrikes against ISIL in Iraq since early August. Some Western states have also participated in some of the strikes in Iraq.
Since late September, the US and some of its Arab allies have been carrying out airstrikes against ISIL inside Syria without any authorization from Damascus or a UN mandate.
