More US troops in Iraq ahead of Mosul offensive

The United States is stepping up its military campaign against ISIS by sending hundreds more troops to assist Iraqi forces in an expected push on Mosul, the militants’ largest stronghold, later in 2016.

US defence secretary Ash Carter made the announcement on Monday during a visit to Baghdad where he met US commanders as well as Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and defence minister Khaled al-Obeidi.

Most of the 560 troop reinforcements will work out of Qayara air base, which Iraqi forces recaptured from ISIS and plan to use as a staging ground for an offensive to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second biggest city.

Government forces said on Saturday they had recovered the air base, about 60 km from the northern city, with air support from the US-led military coalition.

“With these additional US forces I’m describing today, we’ll bring unique capability to the campaign and provide critical support to the Iraqi forces at a key moment in the fight,” Mr Carter told a gathering of US troops in Baghdad.

The latest force increase came less than three months after Washington announced it would dispatch about 200 more soldiers to accompany Iraqi troops advancing towards Mosul. Mr Carter told reporters ahead of Monday’s trip that the United States would now help turn Qayara into a logistics hub.

The airfield is “one of the hubs from which ... Iraqi security forces, accompanied and advised by us as needed, will complete the southernmost envelopment of Mosul,” he said.

The recapture of Mosul, ISIS’ de facto Iraqi capital from which its leader declared a modern-day caliphate in 2014, would be a major boost for Abadi and US plans to weaken ISIS, which has staged attacks in the West and inspired others.

Two years since ISIS seized wide swathes of Iraq and neighbouring Syria in a lightning offensive, the tide has begun to turn as an array of forces lined up against the jihadists have made inroads into their once sprawling territory.