REUTERS - The United States is
sending 200 additional military personnel to Syria to help the campaign to
drive the Islamic State militant group from Raqqa, U.S. Defense
Secretary Ash
Carter said on Saturday.
Speaking in Bahrain
at the Manama Dialogue conference on Middle East security, Carter said the 200,
including special forces trainers, advisers and explosive ordnance disposal
teams, would join 300 U.S. special force troops already in Syria.
"These uniquely
skilled operators will join the 300 U.S. special operations forces already in
Syria, to continue organizing, training, equipping, and otherwise enabling
capable, motivated, local forces to take the fight to ISIL," he said in a
speech, referring to Islamic State.
The first goal of a
coalition opposed to the militants was to "destroy the ISIL cancer’s
parent tumor in Iraq and Syria, because the sooner we crush both the fact and
the idea of an Islamic state based on ISIL’s barbaric ideology, the safer we’ll
all be", he said.
He added that
Russia, President Bashar al-Assad's top foreign military backer, had "only
inflamed the civil war and prolonged suffering of the Syrian people."
Syria's civil war
pits Assad, backed by Iran, Russia and some Shi'ite militias, against mostly
Sunni Arab rebels backed by Turkey, Gulf monarchies and the United States. A
secondary conflict puts all of them at war with Islamic State, an effort that
coincides with a drive against the group in Iraq.
The Iraqi city of
Mosul and the smaller Syrian city of Raqqa are the two pillars of Islamic
State's self-declared caliphate, and recapturing them would be a pivotal defeat
for the ultra-hardline Sunni jihadists.
REUTERS
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