Newspaper: U.S. forces shift from advice, aerial support to ground involvement in Anbar
U.S. army forces participate in combat training in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil, December 22, 2016. Picture taken December 22, 2016. REUTERS/Ammar Awad
“U.S. forces have changed their earlier plans in Anbar, beginning lately to adopt a different approach. They shifted from relying on air forces and intelligence effort to joining troops with government forces to comb the province,” London-based al-Quds Alarabi newspaper reported, quoting Hakim al-Haditihi, a retired Iraqi army officer and a current commander of a tribal paramilitary force fighting IS alongside government troops. “That happened in al-Jazira, Rawa and others,” he said, referring to areas hosting IS pockets.
According to Hadithi, IS controls vast areas of western Anbar’s desert, close to the borders with Syria, which, he said, makes tapping into U.S. forces’ capabilities a “useful” thing.
Local officials have said that security troops were not enough to retake IS strongholds in western Anbar, especially with the Iraqi government employing most of its combat capabilities in clearing the city of Mosul, where a campaign backed by a U.S.-led coalition has entered a sixth month.
News reports have recently said that 2000 more U.S. soldiers had arrived to the military base in Ain al-Assad in western Anbar to assist in combat missions against IS at Iraq’s western borders. The reports were dismissed as false by the Iraqi Joint Operations Command which had been anxious to stress that foreign troops were merely playing an advisory role on the ground and providing only aerial backup for the campaign against the extremist group.
The U.S. said late 2016 it maintained 5000 troops in Iraq.