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Arab Nations Offer to Fight ISIS From Air
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Sunday that “several” Arab nations had offered to join in airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, but any sustained military campaign does not appear imminent, and is likely to require an even more significant commitment from other nations and fighting forces in the region.
In interviews and public statements, administration and military officials described a battle plan that would not accelerate in earnest until disparate groups of Iraqi forces, Kurds and Syrian rebels stepped up to provide the fighting forces on the ground. Equipping, training and coordinating that effort is a lengthy process, officials cautioned.
American officials have made it clear they do not want the airstrikes to get ahead of the ground action against ISIS, which they said would take time to mass. “This isn’t going to be ‘shock and awe’ with hundreds of airstrikes,” one official said, referring to the initial attack on Baghdad at the opening of the Iraq war in March 2003. “We don’t want this to look like an American war.”
Iraqi and Kurdish officials are pressing their view of what the next step should be, even as the United States has carried out more than 150 airstrikes since President Obama announced the campaign to destroy ISIS on Sept. 10.
Specifically, senior Iraqi and Kurdish officials asked the United States as recently as this weekend to take action along the Iraqi-Syrian border to deprive ISIS of the safe havens it enjoys in that area.
“The Iraqis have asked for assistance in the border regions, and that’s something we’re looking at,” one State Department official said.
The description of a calibrated military buildup by coalition forces, combined with a steady effort led by the United States Treasury Department to choke off ISIS’ ability to reap $1 million or more a day from oil sales, emerged as the administration has tried to define what Mr. Obama meant when he said the American goal was to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Sunni extremist group.
The president’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, provided the most current definition of White House thinking on Sunday during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Using an alternative acronym for the extremist group, he said that “success looks like an ISIL that no longer threatens our friends in the region, no longer threatens the United States, an ISIL that can’t accumulate followers or threaten Muslims in Syria, Iraq or otherwise.”
That definition falls short of the classic understanding of what it means to destroy an opposing force. But the administration is betting that it has tailored the goals to appeal to the coalition of oftentimes reluctant partners it is trying to assemble, many of whom are deeply suspicious of each other.
Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking from Paris, declined to say which states had offered to contribute air power, an announcement that White House officials said could await his return to testify in Congress early this week. State Department officials, who asked not to be identified under the agency’s protocol for briefing reporters, said Arab nations could participate in an air campaign against ISIS in other ways without dropping bombs, such as by flying arms to Iraqi or Kurdish forces, conducting reconnaissance flights or providing logistical support and refueling.
I don’t want to leave you with the impression that these Arab members haven’t offered to do airstrikes, because several of them have,” one State Department official said. “The Iraqis would have to be a major participant in that decision,” the official added. “It has to be well structured and organized.”
The United Arab Emirates, which provided some air power in the 2011 attacks on Libya, seemed at the top of the list, with Qatar hosting an American military headquarters. American officials cautioned that all strikes would have to be approved by the newly assembled government in Iraq, as well as by American military planners. That could prove just one challenge to the offer by Arab nations to participate in airstrikes: While Iraq’s struggling military forces have experience operating with the United States, its Shiite-dominated government has never worked with the Sunni states of the Persian Gulf.
The United States has identified ISIS targets in Iraq over the past several weeks. But officials said they were waiting, in part, to match the allied commitments with actual contributions: warplanes, support aircraft that can refuel or provide intelligence, more basing agreements to carry out strikes, and the insertion of trainers from other Western countries.
Tellingly, there are no plans, as of now, to increase the number of American attack planes in the region. The aircraft carrier Carl Vinson is scheduled to relieve the carrier George H. W. Bush in the Persian Gulf next month; if the Pentagon changed its plans and kept two carriers in the gulf, it could double carrier-based firepower over Iraq and Syria. But for now, there is no plan to do so, officials said. Nor are there any plans to increase American ground-based strike aircraft at facilities around the region, in hopes that Persian Gulf and European allies would make up the difference.
Another striking feature of the American plan, officials said, was the deliberate exclusion of coordination with two other players with an interest — and some ability — to take on ISIS: the government of Iran and the forces of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who Mr. Obama declared three years ago was a brutal dictator who had to leave office.
Mr. Kerry has ruled out cooperative efforts with Iranian officials, who a senior administration official said last week are “looking for whatever leverage they can get” in the conflict in hopes of using it to lift pressure on their nuclear program. Iranian-backed militias were on the ground in the Iraqi town of Amerli recently and provided the muscle that Iraqi forces could not in ending a siege by ISIS.
While the administration insisted it would not work alongside Mr. Assad’s forces, the two sides were clearly working toward the same goal — leading to fears that the United States could essentially become Mr. Assad’s air force, at least temporarily, if it begins attacking ISIS emplacements in Syria.
As described by American officials, the battle strategy calls for assembling a force first in Iraq, where the Iraqi army would be guided by 12-man teams of American “advisers” that are expected to begin operating within days, and for new arms and other assistance for the Kurdish forces. Only later would the effort expand to Syria, and the administration is pressing for a congressional vote this week on a $500 million arms package for “moderate” members of the Syrian opposition, now aimed at ISIS rather than the Assad government.
Officials acknowledged that the so-called moderate rebel forces were fractured and far weaker than ISIS. Even so, administration officials struggled to explain whether the United States was at war with ISIS, as both the White House and the Pentagon spokesman said it was last week, or whether it was engaged in a more traditional counterterrorism action. That was how Mr. Kerry characterized the strategy in an effort to make it easier for Sunni states to explain to their own populations why they would be contributing forces against Sunni extremists.
“Originally this is not a war,” Mr. Kerry said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” trying to separate it from the military action in 2003 that he had opposed as a senator. “This is not combat troops on the ground. It’s not hundreds of thousands of people.” He went on to compare it to “war with Al Qaeda and its affiliates,” and said that “in the same context” the United States was “at war with ISIL.”
David E.Sanger
Eric Schmitt
Michael R. Gordon
New York Times