When the clock ticks down on Barack Obama's presidency, five years will have passed since he officially pulled US combat forces from Iraq. But little by little, American troops are returning -- thanks to the Islamic State group and their hold over parts of the region. Recently, Obama said another 250 special forces and support personnel would go to northern Syria, augmenting the 50 or so commandos already training local militias there. Last week, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said another 217 US forces would go to Iraq as advisors, pushing the official total count in that country to 4,087.
The IS group emerged in Iraq and Syria in 2014 amid political chaos across the region, fueled by the Syrian civil war, in which more than 270,000 people have been killed. Obama -- elected on a promise of pulling US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan -- does not want to plunge the United States into another ground war in the Muslim world. While the troop presence in Iraq is tiny compared to the height of the Iraq War, when the United States had nearly 160,000 in-country troops during the "surge," it tests Obama's pledge. The Syria plan is to train Kurdish and Syrian Arab forces to expel the IS group. In Iraq, US advisors are working with the Iraqi security forces. US advisors are not in front-line combat roles, and the Obama administration says it is not committing combat troops, even though US forces have already engaged in limited combat and two American military personnel have been killed in Iraq.
"You are not going to see an American battalion going into battle, but you will see advisors in the middle of battles," Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case officer now with The Soufan Group consultancy, said. He predicted that even the relatively modest goal of training locals to fight the IS group in Syria will fail, given that country's chaos. "It never works. Training and advising your way out of a civil war has never, ever worked," he said. "It didn't work when we had unlimited resources and money in Iraq and Afghanistan."
